Virginia Woolf: Jacob’s Room. 2nd edition. Ed. and Introduced by Urmila Seshagiri (Oxford World’s Classics). Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022.

• Christine Reynier

This new edition of Jacob’s Room has us rediscover Virginia Woolf ’s third novel, a century after its publication by Harcourt, Brace and Company in the United States, a year after it was published by the Hogarth Press in London. Just like Between the Acts, which was misunderstood when it came out, Jacob’s Room baffled its first reviewers, who thought it “too clever” with its lack of plot and sense of unity. In a brilliant and stimulating new introduction, Urmila Seshagiri, Lindsay Young Professor of English at the University of Tennessee, proves that the daring experimentalism of the novel is also an “essential accomplishment”, and uncovers the wealth of the novel and some of its potentialities that still beg to be explored further.