Jacob's Room.

London: Published by Leonard and Virginia Woolf at the Hogarth Press,, 1922. As bright as fire in the mist First edition, first impression, of the author's first truly experimental novel, the earliest full-length realization of the stream-of-consciousness style which she originated in her short stories, and the first of her own novels published by the Hogarth Press. Woolf initially recorded "some idea of a new form for a new novel" in her diary on 26 January 1920. "Suppose one thing should open out of another - as in 'An Unwritten Novel' - only not for 10 pages but 200 or so - doesn't that give the looseness & lightness I want; doesn't that get closer & yet keep form & speed, & enclose everything, everything?... For I figure that the approach will be entirely different this time: no scaffolding; scarcely a brick to be seen; all crepuscular, but the heart, passion, humour, everything, as bright as fire in the mist" (Woolf, Diary, pp. 13-14). She began writing in April 1920 - recording her apprehension of "the creative power which bubbles so pleasantly in beginning a new book" - and finished in November 1921. The novel's publication marked the point at which Leonard and Virginia Woolf decided to take the Hogarth Press forward as a serious publishing venture; they printed around 1,200 copies. The pair's decision to publish Jacob's Room themselves was motivated by Virginia's sensitivity to criticism, as Leonard records in his autobiography: "The idea that we might publish ourselves the book which she had just begun to write, filled her with delight, for she would thus avoid the misery of submitting this highly experimental novel to the criticism of Gerald Duckworth", the publisher who had issued her previous novel, The Voyage Out (Woolf, Downhill, p. 68). Jacob's Room secured Woolf's position as one of the principal figures of literary modernism. In a letter to Woolf on 4 December 1922, T. S. Eliot praised her creativity: "you have freed yourself from any compromise between the traditional novel and your original gift" (Eliot, p. 799). Octavo. Original yellow cloth, paper spine label printed in black. With 14-page publisher's catalogue at rear. Bookseller's ticket to rear pastedown. Spine slightly faded, small chip to label, cloth a touch rubbed but bright, small bumps to extremities, contents clean: a very good copy. Kirkpatrick A6a; Woolmer 26. T. S. Eliot, The Letters: Volume One, 1898-1922, 2009; Leonard Woolf, Downhill All the Way: An Autobiography of the Years 1919-1939, 1967; Virginia Woolf, The Diary: Volume Two, 1920-1924, 1977.