Moments of Reading: A Virginia Woolf Reading Group discussion

Jacob’s Room was Woolf’s first novel where she started using her own voice. After The Voyage Out and Day and Night Jacob’s Room set the course to a wholly different approach of her novel. Virginia Woolf became fascinated how the minds work, how it stores things, the act of speech and, most importantly, the vision; is the moment of being, the train of thought, what made Virginia Woolf famous.

Important to notice is Virginia Woolf’s hatred for symbolism: “I can’t manage Symbolism except in this vague, generalized way … directly I’m told what a thing means, it becomes hateful to me” (VW in Letters to Roger Fry). Critics often talk about recurring images rather than symbols in the works of Virginia Woolf.

Some readers compare Jacob's Room too much with her later work especially To the Lighthouse. In my opinion this is unfair towards Jacob's Room. Although To the Lighthouse is one of Virginia Woolf's masterpieces, Jacob's Room is an important work in the development of Woolf's writing voice and has unique writing qualities.

Feel free to open new topics in this folder with news points of view, interests and questions.

Jacob’s Room (155 pages) reading time 4 weeks

Week 1 (June 21th): I – III (3-37) 34 pages
Week 2 (June 28th): IV – VII (38-76) 38 pages
Week 3 (July 4th): VIII – XI (77-117) 40 pages
Week 4 (July 11th): XII – XIV (118 – 159) 41 pages

I also like the first pages a lot. The story seems to get adrift once we live the bedroom of the boy Jacob. There are glimpses of future work, yet still raw; unpolished. Woolf wonders through the everyday, the inventions we have made up as humans to make sense of it all.

"...the observer is choked with observations. Only to prevent us from being submerged by chaos, nature and society between them have arranged a system of classification which is simplicity itself; stalls, boxes, amphitheatre, gallery" (p. 57)

"It seems then that men and women are equally at fault. It seems that a profound, impartial, and absolutely just opinion of our fellow-creatures is utterly unknown. Either we are men, or we are women. Either we are cold, or we are sentimental. Either we are young, or growing old. In any case life is but a procession of shadows, and God knows why it is that we embrace them so eagerly, and see them depart with such anguish, being shadows." (p.60)