Jacob’s Room was written in 1922 and is Virginia Woolf’s third novel, the first in which she made a radical shift from the established style of prose narrative writing and began experimenting with the modernist ‘stream of consciousness style’ now so firmly associated with her work and which so shook the literary establishment.
Jacob’s Room is overwhelmingly centered around feelings of absence and emptiness and is a collection of memories and sensations that chart the life of Jacob Flanders, largely observed through the eyes of others. The narrative flows from one topic and one character to another without warning or explanation and there appears to be little connection between these fragments.
Likened by some to an impressionist painting, Jacob’s Room was far ahead of its time and still appears strikingly modern almost a century after it was written. It remains a challenging and richly rewarding literary experience.
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“The audiobook is given a thoughtful, sensitive narration by Helen Lloyd, who portrays the many characters in Jacob Flanders’s life with period correctness and precise diction…From the letters to Jacob written by his mother, the memories of the women who cared for him, and the observations of those who knew or thought they knew him, we get shifting impressions of Jacob as he moves through his life. Lloyd’s artful performance offers finesse and well-defined characters.”
— AudioFile
“The impossible has occurred…A new type of fiction has swum into view.”
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Virginia Woolf (1882–1941), one of the major literary figures of the twentieth century, transformed the art of the novel. She was a pioneer in the use of stream of consciousness as a narrative device. The author of numerous novels, collections of letters, journals, and short stories, she was also an admired literary critic and a master of the essay form.
Helen Lloyd is a British actor and voice artist who recorded her first voice-over at the age of fourteen. Since then, she has spent much of her life interpreting other people’s words and bringing characters to life. A classically trained actor, she has performed with many of Britain’s leading repertory theaters, as well as at the Edinburgh Festival, the Roundhouse, and on the West End.