Leonard Woolf’s Ceylon Writings

Abstract

While Virginia Woolf was writing reviews and experimenting with forms of biography, while Lytton Strachey was also reviewing and trying to become a historian or a playwright, while Roger Fry and Desmond MacCarthy were establishing themselves as critics, and E. M. Forster was becoming recognised as an Edwardian novelist, Leonard Woolf was labouring in the Far East as an imperial civil servant. His seven years away from Bloomsbury resulted in a variety of writings — letters, official diaries, short stories, a novel, and, fifty years later, an autobiography. These works of and about Ceylon have more than just tangential relations to Bloomsbury. When examined together and in the context of the Group’s literary history, they display a family resemblance to Bloomsbury’s writings that extends from the Cambridge philosophy to the literature of imperialism.