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the affair turned into a scandal. The Foreign Office and the Royal Navy were the target of a great deal of finger-pointing, partly in fun and partly in seriousness for allowing such a blatant lapse in national security. The situation wasn’t helped by the fact that the Bloomsbury Set were pacifists, which only served to rub salt into the wound. When the Navy high command pushed to have the perpetrators punished, they found themselves powerless to do anything. For one thing, no laws were broken, and secondly the consensus was that they themselves should be punished for allowing themselves to be beguiled by such a lame practical joke.
Needless to say, the Dreadnought Hoax planted the Bloomsbury Set in the public consciousness once and for all, as the oxygen of publicity was theirs to breathe in and enjoy. The hoax occurred on 7 February, 1910. Woolf’s first novel was begun the same year, although she did not publish until 1915, by which time she was already a minor celebrity.
Despite her subsequent success, Woolf was never particularly contented, however, for she had such a troubled soul and indefatigable mind. Today her malady would, doubtless, be described as a bipolar condition, for she oscillated from exuberant mood highs to despairing clinical lows. In the end, she was convinced that she would never come full circle again, so she decided to cut her loses while in the grip of a crushing depression that rendered her unable to see any light at the end of the tunnel. Virginia Woolf died in 1941, leaving behind a highly respected, progressive and considerable canon of essays, critique and novels.
Jacob’s Room
Jacob’s Room (1922) is an intriguing literary experiment by Woolf. She constructs a character by primarily piecing together the memories of others – notably, all of them female. Thus, the eponymous Jacob is never met directly by the reader. He is a fragmentary assemblage of information, which is ambiguous because the sources of information are subjective. Just as history is always an interpretation of past events, rather than the absolute truth, so Jacob’s personality is an interpretation, too.
From a literary point of view, Jacob’s Room is a vitally important contribution to the evolution of the novel. The plot is largely inconsequential to the book, because Woolf’s objective is based on wondering how we might get to know someone on the basis of circumstantial evidence. In effect, she plays a similar role to a police investigator building the profile of a dead or missing person. This makes for an intriguing concept, as it prompts the reader to wonder just how their own personality might be represented and assembled through other people’s reports and remnants of information. The abiding existential enquiry is whether anyone can be described accurately and truthfully. It makes us realise that most of what we are is hidden below the surface anyway, and what we reveal are only considered glimpses of the real complexity of our psychology. As a result, others have different perspectives on our characters, and we ourselves have a different perspective, based largely on how we would like to be viewed rather than how we are likely to be viewed.
Woolf’s work was a seminal event, because it opened the way for experimental forms of literature. Just as avant-garde painters and sculptors were finding new ways to utilise their media, so Woolf was doing similar things with her prose. We might think of Jacob’s Room as a form of artistic abstraction, leaving the reader to do some of the work just as they are expected to do so in a modern art gallery. Woolf had the mind of a progressive artist, wishing to do something new for the sake of pushing the boundaries and making the novel worthy of exploration as a genre, both for her and for the reader.
Of course, it doesn’t necessarily mean that groundbreaking creativity is always accessible or enjoyable. To appreciate frontline art, of any kind, it generally requires a combination of open-mindedness and an education in the movement concerned, which is why so many artists and writers often fail in this regard. In their defence, however, successful experimentation often requires the omission of familiar elements. In this case, plot and allegory are largely neglected to allow the author to focus on the experiment. As a result the story is imbued with a feeling of uncomfortable emptiness due to the constant absence of Jacob. Additionally, there is a very poignant ending, making it clear that Woolf was inspired by a theme familiar to many in the early 1920s: coming to terms with the loss of millions of men following the Great War. Unfortunately all of these lost men, too, became assemblages of memories.
Table of Contents
Classic Literature: Words and Phrases adapted from the Collins English Dictionary
CHAPTER 1
“So of course,” wrote Betty Flanders, pressing her heels rather deeper in the sand, “there was nothing for it but to leave.”
Slowly welling from the point of her gold nib, pale blue ink dissolved the full stop; for there her pen stuck; her eyes fixed, and tears slowly filled them. The entire bay quivered; the lighthouse wobbled; and she had the illusion that the mast of Mr. Connor’s little yacht was bending like a wax candle in the sun. She winked quickly. Accidents were awful things. She winked again. The mast was straight; the waves were regular; the lighthouse was upright; but the blot had spread.
“… nothing for it but to leave,” she read.
“Well, if Jacob doesn’t want to play” (the shadow of Archer, her eldest son, fell across the notepaper and looked blue on the sand, and she felt chilly—it was the third of September already), “if Jacob doesn’t want to play”—what a horrid blot! It must be getting late.
“Where IS that tiresome little boy?” she said. “I don’t see him. Run and find him. Tell him to come at once.” “… but mercifully,” she scribbled, ignoring the full stop, “everything seems satisfactorily arranged, packed though we are like herrings in a barrel, and forced to stand the perambulator which the landlady quite naturally won’t allow. …”