First edition. One of 40 'A Subscribers' copies with the publisher's tipped in printed slip to that effect, inscribed for Rebecca West and signed and dated by Virginia Woolf. Original publisher's yellow cloth with title label to spine. An uncommonly fine copy, the yellow cloth still bright and unusually clean, with just a modicum of fading to the spine.

An excellent association copy of Woolf's first truly experimental novel.
Rebecca West was famously to review Jacob's Room in The New Statesman the month after receiving this copy, writing of the author that: "[she] has again provided us with a demonstration that she is at once a negligible novelist and a supremely important writer." Woolf meanwhile, though admiring of West's journalism, likened her novel The Return of the Soldier to an "over-stuffed sausage".
West and Woolf held a wary mutual regard throughout their lives and frequently reviewed each other's work. It is a measure of West's regard for Woolf that she was one of the very few non-Bloomsbury "A" subscribers to the Hogarth Press.
"In the early days of the Hogarth Press two categories of subscribers were formed, 'A Subscribers' who made a deposit and received all publications of the press, and 'B Subscribers' who were notified of all publications. With the publication of Jacob's Room the decision was taken to establish the Hogarth Press as a business concern and in future to publish all of Mrs Woolf's works. Mr Woolf thought that in order to acknowledge the support given by the 'A Subscribers' to the early publications of the press each subscriber was sent a signed copy of Jacob's Room" - Kirkpatrick (A Bibliography of Virginia Woolf).

Kirkpatrick A6a

Stock ID: 40147