As Woolf discovered her own modernity in the short stories collected in Monday or Tuesday (1921) – stories that, as she indicated in her diary, gave her the ‘form’ for the novel Jacob's Room (1922) – and as the compelling novelty of contemporary writing like that by Joyce and Eliot pressed more on her attention, she was forced to recognise that the post-War present and the realm of the ‘new’ could not so easily be joined with the past as in the programme of Night and Day and the task facing its protagonist Katharine Hilbery. Mrs Dalloway (1925), together with the series of well-known essays such as ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’ written simultaneously, do indeed find new ways of promoting Victorian–modern communications, but Jacob's Room, which we shall look at briefly here, shows Woolf documenting an alarming contemporaneity which, in all its admitted vigour and vividness, seems devoid of any secure linkage with the past. In this, the novel stands in practically an antithetical though congruent relationship to Night and Day and its retrospective obsessions. The diary entry noted above indicates Woolf's excitement at the ‘entirely different’ approach to writing she had discovered for Jacob's Room, a ‘new form for a new novel’ (Dii. 13), but such a form is used to express the pathology of the new in cultural terms as much as its exhilaration.