Room on the Broom Activity Book

a casual activity, and the narrator reminds us that most people we encounter are closed books, like strangers in an omnibus: "Each had his past shut in him like the leaves of a book known to him by heart; and his friends could only -797- read the title, James Spalding, or Charles Budgeon, and the passengers going the opposite way could read nothing at all-save 'a man with a red moustache. " Similarly, what we are allowed to see of Jacob is simply his shell, his immediate environment, touched by his past, activities, and tastes: his room. "What do we seek through millions of pages? Still hopefully turning the pages-oh, here is Jacob's room." Jacob's Room is a hopeless book, full of the "sorrow… brewed by the earth itself." Its tone is edged with an irony uncharacteristic of Woolf's later works; it mocks the travesty of what passes for communication, intimacy, and knowledge of others, with a submerged anger, a frustrated expectation that subsequently disappears ...»