Jacob Flanders is never described. He is assembled instead out of what other people notice — his mother's letters, a room in Cambridge, a woman on a bus, sheep's jaws on the beach, an empty pair of shoes. Woolf set the Hogarth Press up in her own dining room and hand-printed the early books; this was her third novel, the one where she abandoned the old machinery for good, and the war does not need to be described either. Fifty-three plates of figures by the sea and women lost in thought, from Gwen John to Edvard Munch, keep the novel's glimpses of a life before the eye.
