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.

Praise for The Girl Prince

I found the book so engagingly written, full of meticulous research (but not burdened by scholarship) and so thoughtful about the problematics of the hoax. The way you weave in the histories of African and Afro-Caribbean people in Britain works so well, I think, to widen the lens and create a counter narrative. You’ve unearthed so many fascinating contexts for and details about the Hoax.

Anna Snaith

Professor of Twentieth-Century Literature, Department of English, King's College London

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.

Gretchen Gerzina

Paul Murray Kendall Chair in Biography , Univ of Massachusetts Amherst

I must say that this is really an extraordinary piece of research, scholarship, and re-evaluation of an incident that has usually not been given very thoughtful consideration. I am in awe of what you have assembled, and I think this will land with a great splash in Woolf and modernist studies, as well as appealing to readers outside academia. Your research is astounding.

Mark Hussey

Distinguished Professor of English Emeritus, Pace University in New York

A fascinating, unnerving, and enlightening
perspective on a transformative writer and the society that forged her sensibility, radical
creativity, and despair.

Donna Seaman

Booklist

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.

Peter Stansky

Frances and Charles Field Professor of History, Emeritis, Stanford Unversity

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.

Mary Ellen Foley

Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain Bulletin