Virginia Woolf's third novel, Jacob's Room, marked a radical, new departure in her style: the most experimental of all her novels, it enacts the 'smashing and crashing' of form that Woolf called for in the modernist movement. Set in pre-war England, the novel tells the life story of Jacob Flanders. Through the collective memories of those who knew him, we follow his childhood, through to his time at Cambridge, and then into adulthood. Jacob's Room is an evocative and poignant story, made more so so as Woolf describes scenes and characters with a beauty unsurpassed. The author combines language in a majestic manner as she meditates on the inexorable flux of life and provides an elegiac stream found in her best-known work such as To the Lighthouse
