Motifs of emptiness and absence haunt the novel and establish its elegiac feel.

Set in pre-war England, the novel begins in Jacob's childhood and follows him through college at Cambridge and into adulthood.

The story is told mainly through the perspectives of the women in Jacob's life, including the repressed upper-middle-class 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 and then Greece.

The work is seen as an important modernist text; its experimental form is viewed as a progression of the innovative writing style Woolf presented in her earlier collection of short fiction titled Monday or Tuesday (1919).