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Monday, June 28, 2010

Jacob's Room by Virginia Woolf- Hear The Only Recorded Interview with Virginia Woolf

Jacob's Room by Virginia Woolf (1922, read via Dailylit.com)

This is the second Virginia Woolf novel that I have read, the first was The Waves.     I have long wanted to read some of her work (I now hope to read a great deal more) and winning The Waves in a contest gave me my motivation.      Some say it is her most experimental work.    Having just completed Ford Madox Ford's The Parade's End I felt I had at least the germ of an understanding of how to read The Waves.   I next decided to read Jacob's Room not in terms of any great literary logic but because it was the shortest of her three works available on Dailylit.com!-    I liked Jacob's Room a lot but before I say a bit about it I want to share with others a great video I found on Youtube.com-a recording of one of Virginia Woolf's BBC interviews which includes an interesting montage of photos.   It is reputed to be the only recording of her voice.


Jacob's Room is a stream of consciousness work that centers on the impressions the women in his life have of him.   The novel begins in pre-WWI England, takes Jacob through his college years at Cambridge on into adulthood.    The two central women characters in the book are Florinda, a young art student with whom Jacob had a romance and Clara Durrant who was too conservative to entered into a relationship with Jacob.   We also go along on his travels to Greece and Italy.    I enjoyed trying to reconstruct what happened in Jacob's life from the information given by Woolf.   I really really like her prose style and sort of approach her work as if it  were a beautiful very ethereal poem whose pure sumptuousness  would be  desecrated by anything as plebeian as a prose recasting.   There are some great things said about books in Jacob's Room.   I loved this line in all its lovely  refined cattiness:

Dowdy women who don't mind how they cross their legs read Tom Jones.
When I read this I laughed out loud then I thought about how much about how deep these words can take us into the consciousness of the speaker.   My next Woolf will be A Room of  Her Own.   Additionally I will be posting soon on more of her short stories.  

If you listen to the recording of the interview with Woolf please leave a comment as to how you reacted to hearing her voice.

Mel u

9 comments:

  1. That sounds really interesing. I have yet to read anything my Woolf I have to admit. I can't listen to the audio at work but I will look forward to listening to it at home when I get a chance!

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  2. That sounds really interesing. I have yet to read anything my Woolf I have to admit. I can't listen to the audio at work but I will look forward to listening to it at home when I get a chance!

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  3. I've heard this piece before. It's such a wonderful, fanciful, serious piece. It's also a perfect choice, as if someone knew there would only be one recording of Virginia Woolf's voice.

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  4. Wow this is great! Her voice is really engaging. I've read Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse and liked them both very much.

    Thanks for the review.

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  5. Some of the truly dry humour of that essay on words gets lost in her upper-class accent, but still I could listen to her (as I could read her) forever. And now I will have that voice in my head. Thanks, Mel!
    Great review of Jacob's Room, too. All I remembered was his mother. Time for another look.

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  6. That's amazing, thanks for sharing, Mel. Her inflections sound like one of my professors in university. What she said was so beautiful, I wish it were written in some form so we could hold it in our hands to read whenever. "Words do not belong in dictionaries; the belong in our minds.."

    I'll be reading Jacob's Room soon..

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  7. Becky-I never read any Woolf until two months ago-no matter how many books one has read or how long you have been reading-there will always be huge holes in your reading life

    CB-yes-thankss

    Breanna-I hope to read Mrs Dalloway and To The Lighthouse soon-

    ds-yes it was great to hear her voice

    Kiss a Cloud-you are very welcome-

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  8. I recently found this book at a sale table for less than a dollar. I'm glad that you enjoyed it. I loved Mrs Dalloway and I've come to appreciate To the Lighthouse. A Room of One's Own was also very satisfying. I'm hoping to get to The Waves in the next few months too.

    I didn't listen to the Woolf recording (don't have time right now) but I'll have to come back! How fun!

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  9. I adore Virginia Woolf. I have read a good portion of her works and enjoyed them all, although I was a little disappointed with Orlando. It's strange to hear her voice, I studied her for an entire semester and never heard this or her voice at all. Somehow she sounds exactly like I thought she would though.

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