The Girl Prince: Virginia Woolf, Race, and the Dreadnought Hoax
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The Girl Prince intertwines three fascinating stories: a scandalous prank and its afterlife; Woolf’s ideas about race and empire; and the true Black experience in Britain, from real princes to Caribbean writers and South African activists.
Woolf’s social circle was almost exclusively white, but Black lives edged and echoed her own. Using letters, diaries, reporting, and newly discovered archival material, Danell Jones describes an extraordinary chain of events, exploring how and why this future revolutionary novelist joined in a bigoted blackface prank, and probing what it tells us—about Woolf’s Britain and Woolf’s work.
HIGH PLAINS BOOK AWARD FINALIST: NONFICTION
HIGH PLAINS BOOK AWARD FINALIST:
BIG SKY AWARD
Praise for The Girl Prince
Deeply researched and marvellously written, this is the book about Bloomsbury and the Dreadnought Hoax that we’ve been waiting for. Jones gives an essential racial and historical context for the event and its aftermath, which continues to this day.
A fascinating, unnerving, and enlightening
perspective on a transformative writer and the society that forged her sensibility, radical
creativity, and despair.
This story has much significance for questions or racism that are so much of our concern today. One is so grateful to this book for making us so aware of these issues with such depth and perception.
While some may feel they already know all there is to know about the Dreadnought Hoax, until they read The Girl Prince, they really don’t.