Jacob╒s Room. By Virginia Woolf. Richmond: The Hogarth Press. Pp. 290. 7s. 6d. net.
Extracts from reviews of Mrs. Woolf╒s previous books are provided very generously by the publisher. It appears that she is strikingly original, and resembles Dostoievsky, Jane Austen, Meredith, the Brontes, and Henry James in his earlier manner. Her book is certainly remarkable; one recalls with interest ╥The Voyage Out,╙ but that wasn╒t like this; its method was, comparatively, traditional. Perhaps it is partly by the aid of the novelists that we have come to imagine our lives as sequences, but Mrs. Woolf won╒t have that at all. She provides us with chunks of what seems arbitrary and is certainly not explicit, and leaves us to sort them. There is art in it, of course, and doubtless the unaccustomed reader permits himself to be disconcerted too much by the disjointedness. Mrs. Woolf has no turn for the plausible, and scorns the canny. But she does not appear to have much interest in character except as it is manifested in the capacity to receive and record impressions. In this she is an expert, and might almost convince us that colours and shapes are the whole of life. As to the subject of this story ╤ that can hardly matter. Jacobs appears to be young with extraordinary virulence and with no particular intentions. He has a tremendous contempt for ╥Shaw and Wells and the serious sixpenny weeklies,╙ for elderly people, for most things. We may suspect that Mrs. Woolf agrees with him. ╥Don╒t palter with the second rate, Detest your own age. Build a better one.╙ No; of course it╒s very wrong to identify Mrs. Woolf with all that, and yet this is one of the most arrogant books that have been written lately. Never was anything more unkindly, unsentimental, ungenial. Jacob has a few faint love affairs, including one with a married woman who is presented contemptuously, probably he was killed in the war; it doesn╒t matter.
Yet Mrs. Woolf is a considerable writer, and plays tricks with a fine literary sense. Doubtless she is something of a cult, and in certain passages you might believe that she is making fun of the devotees. Her book is a sort of phantasmagoria; sometimes it seems that madness lies this way. Some things are said laboriously, some brilliantly and finely, as of Florinda: ╥Her spelling was abominable. Her sentiments infantile...And for some reason when she wrote she declared her belief in God.╙
Life is seen in flashes, and the reader has a good deal to do. Mrs. Woolf knows all about that: she knows that ╥to prevent us from being submerged by chaos, nature and society between them have arranged a system of classification,╙ &c. And one must admire a gesture that would dismiss a bourgeois reading public. Perhaps she will yet convince us that this is the way to write novels or one of the ways. One would like to read another book of hers when she has returned to convention. Or, perhaps, even before.
