‘Jacob’s Room’: A Young Man Etched in Absence

Nineteen twenty-two was a banner year for modern literature. James Joyce’s “Ulysses” was published in Paris, and T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” appeared in New York and London. It gave us the complete fourth installment of Marcel Proust’s magisterial “In Search of Lost Time” and Hermann Hesse’s “Siddhartha,” about the search for meaning in suffering. Because of this, Virginia Woolf’s novel “Jacob’s Room,” which was also published in 1922, hasn’t always received the attention it deserves. That some of her later novels—“To the Lighthouse” (1927) and “The Waves” (1931)—are perhaps even more accomplished hasn’t helped.