ANTICIPATION AND EFFECT OF THE FIRST WORLD WAR IN VIRGINIA WOOLF’S NOVELS THE VOYAGE OUT AND JACOB’S ROOM

Abstract

When investigating Virginia Woolf’s work, most scholars and readers stick to a handful of titles: novels Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, and The Waves, as well as her book-length essays A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas. While this is absolutely understandable, due to the quality of these works, it is not completely fair. When looking deeper into the body of work by this author, we can find several other titles that deserve our attention, including The Voyage Out and Jacob’s Room, her first and third novel. The importance of these novels goes beyond the anticipation factor – because they do in fact anticipate Mrs Dalloway, The Waves, and other prose this author wrote after them – and is concerned with the treatment of the First World War in them. Namely, even though this event is very important in Woolf’s life and work, it is not central in these novels. They were published during and after the War – in 1915 and 1922, respectively – and feature characters that are involved in it and affected by it, but they do not address them in an obvious and open way. Instead, they foreshadow the War and its effects using several different narrative and stylistic techniques, and this paper will try to explain these techniques and their importance.