Marrin's Bookshop

Synopsis

(the new phoenix library).

Item Description

8vo. 7.25 x 5 inches. 307 pp. Bound in original light blue cloth, gilt, with contrasting red title label, gilt, in unclipped pictorial dust wrapper, which has loss at top edge and head and tail of spine, which is sunned. Extremities a little worn, but otherwise a very good copy. Decorated by series device on title page. 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.