Mapping the Modern Mind

Lindy van Rooyen was born into a bilingual family in Pretoria, South Africa in 1970. Literature has not always been her profession, but her passion. She completed her law degree (LL.M) at the University of Stellenbosch in 1998, and after four years in Copenhagen, Denmark she settled in Hamburg, Germany in 2002. Shortly thereafter she commenced her Master s degree in Scandinavian and English Literature at the University of Hamburg, which she successfully completed in 2011. Through her extensive academic study of the law, foreign languages and literature, Lindy van Rooyen has developed a keen interest in the grey areas between the precision of language and the seemingly infinite realm of human experience. Her first contact with the fiction of Virginia Woolf at Cambridge University in the summer of 2003 proved to be pivotal. Virginia Woolf s quest to define the essence of the human soul within the limits of the art of fiction seemed to echo her own fascination with the tension between the necessity for brevity, the economy of language and the seemingly boundless vistas of the human mind, which had been the subject of literary philosophers like Shakespeare, George Eliot and Virginia Woolf. In her study of Jacob s Room, the author traces Woolf s attempt to express and define the soul of modern man within the confines of a single, fictional room .