‘The people are ghosts,’ Leonard Woolf commented of Jacob's Room (D. ii. 186). In three of her novels – Jacob's Room, To the Lighthouse and The Waves – Woolf constructed her narrative around a central absence: Jacob, Mrs Ramsay, Percival. All three novels are, in their different ways, elegies for the dead. To the Lighthouse was, Woolf wrote, a means of laying the ghosts of her parents to rest. Both Jacob's Room and The Waves address, obliquely, the loss of her brother Thoby. Woolf wrote to Vanessa Bell in 1929: ‘& then Thoby's form looms behind – that queer ghost. I think of death sometimes as the end of an excursion which I went on when he died. As if I should come in & say well, here you are. And yet I am not familiar with him now, perhaps. Those letters Clive read made him strange and external’ (D. iii. 275). Strangeness, externality, and ambivalence in fact characterize the narrative relationship to Jacob; the narrative position is unstable, veering or ‘vacillating’ (a key term for Woolf) between internal and external perspectives, past and present, pathos and satire. Woolf's ‘elegiac’ novels were, at one level, elegies for the conventions of the novel itself.

Vanessa Bell's illustration for ‘A Haunted House’ in Monday or Tuesday is a sketch of a large, empty armchair, behind which is a portion of a window framed by a tied-back curtain. The sketch is characteristic of the artist: as Roger Fry wrote of Bell, ‘her rooms are empty and her landscapes lonely’. It prefigures one of the dominant images of Jacob's Room, contained in the sentence which occurs near the beginning of the novel and is repeated verbatim at the end: ‘Listless is the air in a empty room, just swelling the curtain; the flowers in the jar shift. One fibre in the wicker armchair creaks, though no one sits there’ (JR 31), the repetition blurring the distinction among the absent between, in Gillian Beer's words, ‘those who are dead and those who are away’.