Jacob’s Room by Virginia Woolf; Unabridged MP3 Audio Book; Narrator Nadia May

This impressionistic novel by Virginia Woolf marks the author’s first move toward the experimentation for which she would later become recognized. Through a montage of passing images, conversations, and stream-of-consciousness monologues, it tells the story of Jacob Flanders, an idealistic and sensitive young man attempting to reconcile his love of classical culture with the chaotic reality of contemporary society. As Jacob grows from childhood into adulthood, we follow his experiences in college and in travels, in love and in war, through the perspectives and impressions of the various people in his life.

Jacob’s Room established Virginia Woolf's reputation as a highly poetic and symbolic writer who places emphasis not on plot or action but on the psychological realm of her characters. Hailed by friends such as T. S. Eliot, the book represents a turning point in the history of the English novel. Wrote E. M. Forster, “Jacob’s Room comes as a tremendous surprise. The impossible has occurred….A new type of fiction has swum into view.”

“Nadia May reads Virginia Woolf's stream of consciousness…with such force and authority that gradually, in the poetry of these images, a character, albeit somewhat lost and stillborn, breaks through into a hollow world, exactly as Woolf intended. It is the narrator's assurance, as it was the writer's belief before her, that this stream of consciousness cataloging would produce both world and character, and so it does.”—AudioFile

"The coherence of the book is even more amazing than its beauty. In the stream of glittering similes, unfinished sentences, hectic catalogues, and unanchored proper names, we seem to be going nowhere. Yet the goal comes, the method and the matter prove to have been one, and looking back from the pathos of the closing scene, we see for a moment the airy drifting atoms piled into a colonnade."—E.M. Forster

VIRGINIA WOOLF (1882-1941), one of the major literary figures of the twentieth century, transformed the art of the novel. The author of numerous novels, collections of letters, journals, and short stories, she was an admired literary critic and a master of the essay form.

Virginia Woolf (1882-1941), one of the major literary figures of the twentieth century, transformed the art of the novel with such groundbreaking works as Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse.