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Synopsis

Revised and annotated in accordance with the original manuscript. edited by yasmine gooneratne. (studies in british literature volume 93).

Item Description

8vo. 9.25 x 6.25 inches. xv + [i] + 273 + 1 pp.+ [4] pp. series list. Bound in pictorial stiff boards. Spine sunned and minor wear to extremities; otherwise a very good copy. Initials on first free endpaper. Illustrated by photographic portrait frontispiece. Leonard Woolf (1880-1969) spent seven years as a colonial administrator in Ceylon: 'He served for seven years, at Jaffna, Kandy, and finally, Hambantota where, as the youngest assistant government agent in the service, he administered 100,000 Sinhalese in a district of 1000 miles. There he continued what he later called his anti-imperialist education. Striving to improve the lives of the villagers with an efficiency that was at times ruthless, he became increasingly ambivalent about his government's mismanagement of jungle agriculture, the absurdity of one civilization imposing itself on another, and the hypocrisy of the British failure to prepare its colony for self-government. Returning on leave to England in 1911, Woolf began The Village in the Jungle (1913), a novel that movingly reflected these concerns' (DNB). First published by Edward Arnold, it was dedicated to his wife, Virginia. The Editor of this edition, Yasmine Gooneratne (b.1935) is a Sri Lanka academic, poet, essayist and short story writer.