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eBook Category: Classic Literature
eBook Description: Brief impressions and conversations, internal monologues, and letters convey the stream-of-consciousness story of a lonely young man unable to reconcile his classical ideals with the reality of World War I society. Sensitive exploration of character, existence. The tale of Jacob Flanders, a lonely young man unable to reconcile his love of classical culture with the chaotic reality of World War I society, unfolds in a series of brief impressions and conversations, internal monologues, and letters. A sensitive examination of character development and the meaning of life, this 1922 novel features first-rate examples of Woolf's influential techniques.

eBook Publisher: Fictionwise.com/Fictionwise Classic, Published: 1922
Fictionwise Release Date: August 2004

This eBook is also available in the following bundle(s):

• Fictionwise Classics [Authors H-Z Bundle]

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Available eBook Formats [MultiFormat - What's this?]: eReader (PDB) [186 KB] , ePub (EPUB) [218 KB] , Rocket/REB1100 (RB) [161 KB] , Portable Document Format (PDF) [900 KB] , Palm Doc (PDB) [186 KB] , Microsoft Reader (LIT) [214 KB] , Franklin eBookMan (FUB) [223 KB] , hiebook (KML) [379 KB] , Sony Reader (LRF) [191 KB] , iSilo (PDB) [152 KB] , Mobipocket (PRC) [190 KB] , Kindle Compatible (MOBI) [218 KB] , OEBFF Format (IMP) [248 KB]
Words: 54474
Reading time: 155-217 min.
Microsoft Reader (LIT) Format: Printing DISABLED, Read-Aloud ENABLED
Portable Document Format (PDF) Format:  Printing ENABLED, Read-Aloud DISABLED
All Other formats: Printing DISABLED, Read-aloud DISABLED

CHAPTER ONE

"So of course," wrote Betty Flanders, pressing her heels rather deeper in the sand, "there was nothing for it but to leave."

Slowly welling from the point of her gold nib, pale blue ink dissolved the full stop; for there her pen stuck; her eyes fixed, and tears slowly filled them. The entire bay quivered; the lighthouse wobbled; and she had the illusion that the mast of Mr. Connor's little yacht was bending like a wax candle in the sun. She winked quickly. Accidents were awful things. She winked again. The mast was straight; the waves were regular; the lighthouse was upright; but the blot had spread.

"...nothing for it but to leave," she read.

"Well, if Jacob doesn't want to play" (the shadow of Archer, her eldest son, fell across the notepaper and looked blue on the sand, and she felt chilly--it was the third of September already), "if Jacob doesn't want to play"--what a horrid blot! It must be getting late.

"Where IS that tiresome little boy?" she said. "I don't see him. Run and find him. Tell him to come at once." "...but mercifully," she scribbled, ignoring the full stop, "everything seems satisfactorily arranged, packed though we are like herrings in a barrel, and forced to stand the perambulator which the landlady quite naturally won't allow...."

Such were Betty Flanders's letters to Captain Barfoot--many-paged, tear-stained. Scarborough is seven hundred miles from Cornwall: Captain Barfoot is in Scarborough: Seabrook is dead. Tears made all the dahlias in her garden undulate in red waves and flashed the glass house in her eyes, and spangled the kitchen with bright knives, and made Mrs. Jarvis, the rector's wife, think at church, while the hymn-tune played and Mrs. Flanders bent low over her little boys' heads, that marriage is a fortress and widows stray solitary in the open fields, picking up stones, gleaning a few golden straws, lonely, unprotected, poor creatures. Mrs. Flanders had been a widow for these two years.

"Ja--cob! Ja--cob!" Archer shouted.

"Scarborough," Mrs. Flanders wrote on the envelope, and dashed a bold line beneath; it was her native town; the hub of the universe. But a stamp? She ferreted in her bag; then held it up mouth downwards; then fumbled in her lap, all so vigorously that Charles Steele in the Panama hat suspended his paint-brush.

Like the antennae of some irritable insect it positively trembled. Here was that woman moving--actually going to get up--confound her! He struck the canvas a hasty violet-black dab. For the landscape needed it. It was too pale--greys flowing into lavenders, and one star or a white gull suspended just so--too pale as usual. The critics would say it was too pale, for he was an unknown man exhibiting obscurely, a favourite with his landladies' children, wearing a cross on his watch chain, and much gratified if his landladies liked his pictures--which they often did.

"Ja--cob! Ja--cob!" Archer shouted.