Nick Rankin, in BBCnews, 23 May 2014, where the title runs thus: “Leonard Woolf’s forgotten Sri Lankan novel” …… The Bloomsbury Group and Sri Lanka are rarely spoken of in the same breath, but that is partly because Leonard Woolf’s groundbreaking first novel, The Village in the Jungle, is unjustly ignored, argues writer and broadcaster Nick Rankin.
She was born Virginia Stephen, daughter of the Victorian bookman Sir Leslie Stephen, but when she married in 1912, her name changed to Virginia Woolf, and she went on to become the best-known woman writer of the 20th Century.
When he graduated from Cambridge in 1904, Leonard Woolf joined the Colonial Civil Service and was sent to Ceylon, where he stayed for the next seven years. Woolf was a liberal intellectual – he travelled out with the complete works of Voltaire in his luggage, in 70 volumes – and he was not enamoured of the white colonial society he found himself in. He threw himself into his administrative work, was promoted to Assistant Government Agent and in 1908 he was put in charge of running his own district in south-east Ceylon, Hambantota Province, which covered 1,000 square miles and contained 100,000 people.
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