James Joyce ’s “Ulysses” was published in Paris, and T.S. Because of this, Virginia Woolf’s novel “Jacob’s Room,” which was also published in 1922, hasn’t always received the attention it deserves. That some of her later novels—“To the Lighthouse” (1927) and “The Waves” (1931)—are perhaps even more accomplished hasn’t helped. Yet, it was in “Jacob’s Room” that Woolf first experimented with the episodic narrative she would use in “To the Lighthouse.” The novel also contains some of Woolf’s most startling sentences. One character observes that “each word” fell from Jacob’s mouth “like a disc new cut.” That may not always be true of Jacob, but it is of Woolf’s novel, which is full of such coins.

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