04 March 2009

Virginia Woolf's 'Jacob's Room

Jacob's Room (1922) was the first of Virginia Woolf's novels to be self-published. She took the opportunity of being free from someone else's editorial control to push the boundaries of her experimental literary technique. It thus marked an important step in modernism and a breakthrough to a greater degree of self-confidence in her work.

" Virginia's Jacob's Room was our first major work, a full-length novel. 1,200 copies of it were printed for us by R. and R. Clark of Edinburgh. [It] was published in October 1922 and began at once to sell fairly briskly, and I had a second impression of 1,000 copies printed by Clark. By the end of 1923 we had sold 1,413 copies; the cost of printing and publishing up to that date had been £276 1s. 6d. and the receipts had been £318 6s. 0d., so that our publisher's profit was £42 4s. 6d. We though that we had done extremely well. "

Leonard Woolf, An Autobiography


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