"As Bright as Fire in the Mist"
WOOLF, Virginia. Jacob's Room. Richmond: The Hogarth Press. 1922.
8vo. Original publishers yellow cloth with title label to spine, pages untrimmed, pp. 290, 14 (publisher's ads); toning and marking to covers and spine soiled with significant rubbing to top and bottom of spine as well as fading to title label; endpapers with spotting; otherwise good.
First edition, one of 1,200 copies printed.
"Every face, every shop, bedroom window, public-house, and dark square is a picture feverishly turned--in search of what? It is the same with books. What do we seek through millions of pages?"- Jacob's Room.
One of the most integral of the Modernist texts, Jacob's Room is set in pre-war England and although it loosely concerns itself with the life of Jacob Flanders, most of the information about his person can be gleaned from the impressions of those around him (mainly women). In this way, one of Woolf’s earliest novels has been considered a powerful character study and a challenge to the boundaries of traditional narrative.
Virginia Woolf is remembered as one of the most essential, if not the most important, 20th-century Modernist novelists. She championed the execution of stream of consciousness as a narrative device; a rebellion against contemporary literary discourse. Jacob's Room was preceded by The Voyage Out (published by her half-brothers publishing house, Gerald Duckworth and Company). Woolf was also a central member of the Bloomsbury Group, a creative set consisting of her sister, the painter Vanessa Bell, and other prominent artists and intellectuals including John Maynard Keynes, Duncan Grant and Leonard Woolf. Virginia and Leonard would marry in 1912 and found the Hogarth Press, which famously published T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and Virginia’s later novels such as the classic Mrs Dalloway (1925) and this edition itself.
Writing in her diary in January 1920, Woolf would remark of her innovative administration of fiction that there be, “no scaffolding, scarcely a brick to be seen; all crepuscular, but the heart … everything as bright as fire in the mist”. Instead, she enveloped herself into the psyche of the human condition and wrote in pursuit of the mental metropolis at the expense of strict linear narrative and realist materiality. As she writes in Jacob's Room, "It's not catastrophes, murders, deaths, diseases, that age and kill us; it's the way people look and laugh, and run up the steps of omnibuses".
Captivating the imaginations of feminists for generations, in her 1929 essay, A Room of One’s Own, Woolf would state, “Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind”.
Kirkpatrick A6a,
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