He left everything just as it was.... Did he think he would come back?"
Jacob's Room" was the first book in Virginia Woolf's unique, experimental style, making it an important text of early Modernism. Ostensibly, the story is about the life of Jacob Flanders, the title character, who is evoked purely by other characters' perceptions and memories of him. Jacob remains an absence throughout. Elegiac in tone, the work beautifully memorializes the longing and pain of a generation that lost so many of its most promising young men to World War I.
Upon it's release E.M. Forster remarked, "amazing.... a new type of fiction has swum into view."
The Art of The Novella Series
Too short to be a novel, too long to be a short story, the novella is generally unrecognized by academics and publishers. Nonetheless, it is a form beloved and practiced by literature's greatest writers. In the Art Of The Novella series, Melville House celebrates this renegade art form and its practitioners with titles that are, in many instances, presented in book form for the first time.

This acclaimed bibliography of Virginia Woolf, prepared with the late Leonard Woolf's agreement and co-operation, has been greatly expanded since its first publication in 1957 and the revised editions of 1967 and 1980. The need for a fourth revised edition is the result both of the explosion of new editions of existing books, and of the appearance of much previously unpublished material. Section A, Books and Pamphlets, has increased from 54 to 79 items; Section AA, Composite Editions, is a new section with nine items; Section C, Contributions to Periodicals, has increased by 78 items, including 56 unsigned reviews; Section D, Translations, has increased from 207 to 557 items; Section F, Letters, is new in that it now itemizes only uncollected letters. Studies of variant editions and texts are noted in the entry for the work concerned. The bibliography is an essential tool for all interested in Woolf.

With this sixth volume The Hogarth Press completes a major literary undertaking - the publication of the complete essays of Virginia Woolf. In this, the last decade of her life, Woolf wrote distinguished literary essays on Turgenev, Goldsmith, Congreve, Gibbon and Horace Walpole. In addition, there are a number of more political essays, such as 'Why Art To-Day Follows Politics', 'Women Must Weep' (a cut-down version of Three Guineas and never before reprinted), 'Royalty' (rejected by Picture Post in 1939 as 'an attack on the Royal family, and on the institution of kingship in this country'), 'Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid', and even 'America, which I Have Never Seen...' ('['Americans are] the most interesting people in the world - they face the future, not the past'). In 'The Leaning Tower' (1940), Virginia Woolf faced the future and looked forward to a more democratic post-war age: 'will there be no more towers and no more classes and shall we stand, without hedges between us, on the common ground?' Woolf stimulates her readers to think for themselves, so she 'never forges manifestos, issues guidelines, or gives instructions that must be followed to the letter' (Maria DiBattista). In providing an authoritative text, introduction and annotations to Virginia Woolf's essays, Stuart N. Clarke has prepared a common ground - for students, common readers and scholars alike - so that all can come to Woolf without specialised knowledge.

Virginia Woolf began writing reviews for the Guardian 'to make a few pence' from her father's death in 1904, and continued until the last decade of her life. The result is a phenomenal collection of articles, of which this selection offers a fascinating glimpse, which display the gifts of a dazzling social and literary critic as well as the development of a brilliant and influential novelist. From reflections on class and education, to slyly ironic reviews, musings on the lives of great men and 'Street Haunting', a superlative tour of her London neighbourhood, this is Woolf at her most thoughtful and entertaining.