Virginia Woolf penned these words in an early handwritten draft of Jacob's Room (1922), later removing them from the final novel. Dry and slightly sarcastic, at once understated and perversely exaggerated, these lines contemplate literature coolly, sitting at the bottom of a page that is covered in scratch marks and deletions. If we flip over the leaf of the holograph, we come upon something very different: “50 2 53 280[x]50 = 14,000” (160). Here, Woolf calculated a word count on the back of her writing. The reflection is odd: buried amid Woolf's first experimental novel, opposite a page that muses about the value of literature, we find a blank sheet scratched with arithmetic. These marks are literally, physically reversed: recto—literature; verso—mathematics.

Across her long writing career, Virginia Woolf depicted mathematics as the contrary of literature, constructing an ongoing opposition between literary ambiguity and mathematical consistency. Her novels reflect on mathematics as though drawn to that which is most different from themselves, and by considering what writing is not, Woolf further pins down what writing really is. Like a shadow that illuminates the self in perfect negative, Woolf's negative depictions of mathematics illuminate the prominent contradictions and ambiguities of her own writing. In the process, Woolf develops a play of opposites which represents rivalries that are inherent in communication generally, fundamental to the division between written symbols and the world they describe. Woolf's simultaneous communication of oppositions within single, common terms ultimately enables a newfound generality.

Just before Jacob's Room, Woolf's second novel featured a protagonist who was an aspiring mathematician. In Night and Day (1919), Katharine Hilbery “would not have cared to confess how infinitely she preferred the exactitude, the star-like impersonality, of figures to the confusion, agitation, and vagueness of the finest prose” (42). Katharine's love of mathematics does not exist in and of itself; instead it is repeatedly, reliably juxtaposed with her dislike of literature, and as Katharine moves toward mathematics and maturity, her desires exist only in oppositional struggle with the arts.