Woolf and Beethoven

Post by Urmila Seshagiri, editor of the new Oxford World’s Classics edition of Jacob’s Room (1922)

These are the opening paragraphs of the post from the Oxford University Press blog page.

Jacob’s Room begins with a mystery: ‘So of course,’ wrote Betty Flanders, pressing her heels rather deeper in the sand, ‘there was nothing for it but to leave’. Why does Betty Flanders (with her ominous surname) have to leave? Why ‘of course’? We never find out. It is a beginning that announces an end, a departure imposed rather than chosen. And it heralds a story built on the hollow promises of a young man’s coming-of-age: promises integral to the nineteenth century’s massive array of social realist fiction, those novels by Dickens, Thackeray, and the Brontës that contained templates for molding men who would uphold the finest qualities of the British Empire. But Jacob’s Room holds such templates up to the pitiless gaze of history and resists their plot-making powers. Written in the wake of the Great War that slaughtered 1 million Englishmen, Woolf’s anti-Bildungsroman suggested that the very virtues the Empire prided itself on—valor, stoicism, duty—were the sources of its vulnerability. How does the formal originality of Jacob’s Room, its dark tenor, fit into the arc of Woolf’s career? And a century after its publication in 1922, what does it tell us about English literature’s annus mirabilis, the year that gave us Joyce’s Ulysses, Eliot’s The Waste Land, and Mansfield’s The Garden Party and Other Stories?

I found unexpected and illuminating answers to these questions when after days of studying Woolf’s drafts and preparatory notes for the novel in the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library, I treated myself to symphony tickets, thrilled by the prospect of hearing live music after the pandemic. It was a privilege to hear Yannick Nézet-Séguin conduct the Philadelphia Orchestra in an all-Beethoven concert at Carnegie Hall. And when he turned to address the audience, explaining how Beethoven’s sense of musical possibility changed between Symphony 2 and Symphony 3 — the ‘Eroica’ — I suddenly understood how to read the marriage of aesthetics and history in Jacob’s Room. 

You can read the full article on the Oxford University Press blog page.

For more on Woolf and Beethoven, see Emma Sutton’s book, Virginia Woolf and Classical Music (2013).