WOOLF, Virginia.

Inquire · Offered by Peter Harrington

Jacob's Room. First edition of the author's first truly experimental novel and the first of her own novels published by the Hogarth Press. It is her earliest full-length realization of the stream-of-consciousness style that she had developed in her short stories.Printed in an edition of around 1,200 copies, Jacob's Room marked the point at which Leonard and Virginia Woolf decided to take the Hogarth Press forward as a serious publishing venture. The pair's decision to publish it 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, p. 68).This copy belonged to Alfred Duff Cooper (1890-1954), politician and 1st Viscount Norwich. The Duff Cooper Prize, awarded for outstanding works of non-fiction, was presented to Quentin Bell for his biography of his aunt, Virginia Woolf (1972). Cooper's engraved bookplate is on the front pastedown.

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