One of the best examples of Woolf's modernist innovation, the story starts in Jacob's childhood and follows him through college at Cambridge, and then into adulthood. The narrative is told mainly through the perspectives of the women in Jacob's life, including the repressed Clara Durrant and the uninhibited young art student Florinda, with whom he has an affair. His time in London forms a large part of the story, though towards the end of the novel he travels to Italy, then Greece.

Virginia Woolf, an English writer, one of the foremost modernist literary figures of the twentieth century. Woolf was a significant figure in London literary society and a member of the Bloomsbury Group, an enormously influential gathering of English writers, intellectuals, philosophers and artists. Their works and views deeply influenced literature, aesthetics, criticism, economics, and modern values and attitudes.