Jacob's Room (annotated)

The Virginia Woolf Library Annotated Edition

Virginia Woolf, Mark Hussey, Woolf, Virginia

• Publisher: Mariner Books
• Year: 2008
• Print ISBN: 9780156034791
• eBook ISBN: 9780547564111
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Classics
• Index: Literature

Woolf's first distinctly modernist novel follows an aloof yet beloved young man from his childhood through his student days to his too-early death during World War I.

 

Annotated and with an introduction by Vara Neverow

Notes to Jacob’s Room

Unless otherwise indicated in these notes, “Roe” refers to Virginia Woolf, Jacob’s Room, edited with an introduction and notes by Sue Roe (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992). “Bishop” refers to Virginia Woolf, Jacob’s Room, edited with an introduction and notes by Edward L. Bishop (Oxford: Shakespeare Head Press, 2004). OED refers to the online Oxford English Dictionary. Where a work’s full citation is not given in a note, details can be found either in the introduction’s list of works cited or in the suggestions for further reading.

gold nib [3] Betty Flanders is using an expensive fountain pen to write her letter.

full stop [3] British usage for period.

lighthouse [3] The Godrevy Lighthouse at St. Ives, Cornwall, which also appears in Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, but there is fictionalized and relocated to the Hebrides, islands off the coast of Scotland.

perambulator [3] British term for baby carriage.

Scarborough is seven hundred miles from Cornwall [4] Betty is staying in Cornwall, probably St. Ives, where Virginia Stephen spent summers from 1882 to 1895. Woolf visited St. Ives in 1921 while she was writing Jacob’s Room. The town is only about 430 miles from Scarborough. Scarborough was attacked by German battleships on December 16, 1914 (see Usui 7; Bradshaw 13–17).

Captain Barfoot is in Scarborough [4] David Bradshaw (7–9) suggests that John, Betty Flanders’s third son, was fathered by Captain Barfoot.

glass house [4] A greenhouse.

widows stray solitary in the open fields, picking up stones, gleaning a few golden straws, lonely, unprotected, poor creatures [4] A reference to the book of Ruth (book eight of the Hebrew Bible and the Old Testament). Ruth, given the option of staying with her own people in Moab after both her husband and her father-in-law die, chooses instead to follow her mother-in-law, Naomi, back to Bethlehem, where the two women survive by gleaning the fields for grain after the harvest. The fields belong to Naomi’s relative Boaz, who eventually marries Ruth and saves her and her mother-in-law from poverty (see Neverow, “Return” 221).

Panama hat [4] A Panama hat, first introduced in the nineteenth century, is made of plaited straw and has a brim.

greys flowing into lavenders . . . too pale as usual [4] Charles Steele, like Mr. Paunceforte in To the Lighthouse, is self-taught. At least in his own perception, his style of painting seems not to align with the popular techniques of the moment. He is very conscious of how his work will be judged and assumes that the judgment will be negative. St. Ives in Cornwall has been an artists’ community since the early nineteenth century. Throughout the novel, Woolf uses painterly techniques for verbal representation of visual scenes. With regard to her description of Steele’s painting, she is using ekphrasis, a verbal description of a visual artwork (see Wall).

Archer lagged past him, trailing his spade [5] Archer, Jacob’s older brother, has a child’s shovel; Jacob has the bucket that goes with the set of beach toys.

raw sienna [5] A caramel color.

Titian [5] Charles Steele is comparing himself to one of the greatest European painters in history. Tiziano Vecellio (ca. 1488–1576)—known as Titian—was a renowned sixteenth-century Italian painter who started a new phase of his creativity in his fifties and died at ninety-one.

parasol [5] An umbrella used typically by women for protection from the sun.

early-closing day [6] In the United Kingdom, the weekday when the shops close early.

bandanna handkerchiefs [6] Large patterned squares of fabric.

sea holly [7] Eryngium maritimum, a tall, spiky plant with blue flowers native to European coastlines.

lodgings [7] Rental of a furnished living space; Mrs. Flanders is worried about the landlady’s reaction to Jacob’s sheep’s jaw.

bonnet-pin [7] A hat pin; the pin was used to secure a woman’s bonnet against the wind by passing through her hair, which would have been twisted up into a bun.

purple aster [8] An autumn-blooming flower. Its symbolic meaning is “afterthought”—perhaps a punning reference to Mrs. Flanders’s forgetfulness.

Strand magazines [8] An American-style periodical launched in 1891 that ceased publication in 1950. It was named after a famous street in London. Each issue offered articles on topics including the sciences and history, humorous items, and short fiction. The readership was mainly middle class.

Think of the fairies [9] A very similar passage occurs in To the Lighthouse as Mrs. Ramsay soothes her son James and her daughter Cam (To the Lighthouse, Orlando: Harcourt, 2005: 116–17).

cistern [9] A large receptacle for holding water to flush the toilet.

I say, won’t that steamer sink? [9] The sound of water flowing is linked by association to Archer’s question about a ship at sea in the storm. Archer will eventually serve in the King’s Navy. The novel continually foreshadows World War I.

spirit-lamp [9] A small lamp with a lighted wick burning a volatile fuel such as alcohol.

cot [9] A crib. Rebecca is in the room with John, Betty Flanders’s youngest child, who has just fallen asleep.

ma’m [10] The narrator marks the class distinction between Mrs. Flanders and her servant, Rebecca.

Dods Hill [14] A fictitious name. Castle Hill is the dominating geological feature in Scarborough.

the Crimea [14] The Crimean War (1853–1856) was a confrontation over control of the Crimean Peninsula on the Black Sea and the Azov Sea. In the war, Imperial Russia confronted an alliance of the United Kingdom, France, the Ottoman Empire, and the Kingdom of Sardinia.

Roman fortress [14] An exaggerated reference to the remains of the Roman beacon built in A.D. 370.

the whole of Scarborough [14] The view from Castle Hill shows the entire town below.

the red spot where the villas were building [15] The expansion of the town of Scarborough into a suburban area where the construction of new residences had started. The villas would have been made of red brick.

allotments . . . diamond flash of little glass houses in the sun [15] Allotments are parcels of land allocated for the vegetable and flower plots and small greenhouses of the residents.

shingle [15] Pebbly beachfront area where small boats would be launched.

Little pleasure boats . . . goats suddenly cantered their carriages through crowds [15] In 1626, a resident of Scarborough had discovered a spring of spa water and as a result the town became Britain’s first seaside resort. With the coming of the railway in the 1840s, the accessibility and popularity of Scarborough increased.

Corporation [15] From 1163, Scarborough had been a borough run by a Corporation responsible for all aspects of the city’s functions.

Numbers of sponge-bag trousers were stretched in rows [15] Describing rows of men wearing checked trousers lying on Bath chairs at the Scarborough Spa, Woolf creates a literary synecdoche (the part standing for the whole) in this painterly style using a Postimpressionist technique (see Roe, “Impact”). Bishop notes that the trousers are “so called because of the resemblance to the print commonly used on bags for carrying sponges and other bath supplies” (150 n12).

Purple bonnets fringed soft, pink, querulous faces on pillows in bath chairs [15] This synecdoche evokes the image of petulant women wearing elaborate bonnets as they rest their heads on pillows while lying in wheeled Bath chairs. The chairs are named for another spa resort in the city of Bath, a site of ancient Roman baths.

Triangular hoardings were wheeled along by men in white coats [15] Large advertisements and breaking news displayed on boards.

So that was a reason for going down into the Aquarium [15] The monster shark is being exhibited. Eugenius Birch (1818–1884) designed the elaborate Scarborough Aquarium in an Indo-Moorish style. The building was demolished in the 1960s.

spirits of salt [15] Hydrochloric acid is used to preserve specimens.

Gladstone bag [15] Named after the Victorian-era British prime minister William Ewart Gladstone (1809–1898), the lightweight hand luggage has two hinged compartments. The hinged compartments...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Contents
• Copyright
• Illustrations
• Virginia Woolf
• Chronology
• Introduction
• Jacob’s Room
• One
• Two
• Three
• Four
• Five
• Six
• Seven
• Eight
• Nine
• Ten
• Eleven
• Twelve
• Thirteen
• Fourteen
• Notes to Jacob’s Room
• Suggestions for Further Reading: Virginia Woolf
• Suggestions for Further Reading: Jacob’s Room
• Illustration Credits
• About the Author
• Connect with HMH
• Footnotes