The Girl Prince: Virginia Woolf, Race, and the Dreadnought Hoax
. . .
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.
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.
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Excerpt from
The Girl Prince: Virginia Woolf, Race, and the Dreadnought Hoax
On a rainy, windswept day in February 1906, King Edward VII officially launched Britain’s newest battleship. As he cut through the last rope securing the hull of the H.M.S. Dreadnought to its wooden cradle, the crowd cheered, the band played “God Save the King,” and the ship plunged into the Portsmouth harbor. Its audacious design—bigger, faster, and more powerful than anything the world had ever seen—rebranded the Royal Navy as the most strategically daring, technologically advanced, and militarily superior maritime force on the globe.
Four years later, a group of young white Britons finagled their way onto the Dreadnought’s decks disguised as African royalty. When the press got hold of the story, the daring stunt made headlines from Manchester to Mozambique. “british warship hoaxed,” declared the Chicago Tribune:
Bogus Princes of Abyssinia
& Suite Fooled Officers
Jokers are Well Known
Five Men and a Girl
Make up Like Real Africans
The Admiralty did not appreciate their most fêted vessel being the target of a humiliating hoax. Furious memoranda flew from the Dreadnought to the Admiralty to the Foreign Office and back. The pranksters were tracked down. Lawyers consulted. Criminal charges considered. In the House of Commons, outraged members of parliament demanded answers.
What the public did not know at the time was that the twenty-eight-year-old “girl” of the headlines was aspiring novelist Virginia Stephen. In the years to come, her groundbreaking books would propel her into literary fame as the innovative modernist writer and feminist icon Virginia Woolf.