The Girl Prince: Virginia Woolf, Race and the Dreadnought Hoax

by Danell Jones

In February 1910, the young woman who would become Virginia Woolf played the most famous practical joke in British military history. Blackening her face and masquerading as an African prince, with friends she conned her way onto the Dreadnought , the Empire's best battleship. The stunt made headlines around the world for weeks, embarrassed the Royal Navy, and provoked heated discussions in parliament. But who was the 'girl prince' unidentified in public debate at the time, and what was she doing there?

The Girl Prince intertwines three fascinating 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 near-exclusively white, but Black lives edged and echoed hers within the rich fabric of national culture, including in response to the hoax. Using letters, diaries, reporting and newly discovered archives, 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.

This is a tantalizingly fresh take on an iconic writer and her deeply problematic stunt.

Genres: History, Biography

311 pages, Hardcover

Published December 15, 2023

About the author

Danell Jones’s poetry, fiction, essays, and reviews have appeared in various publications. Jones has a Ph.D. from Columbia University where she won a Whiting Fellowship in the Humanities for her work on Virginia Woolf. She was awarded the Jovanovich Award for Poetry from the University of Colorado and was chosen as a finalist for both the Bakeless Poetry Prize and the PEN/Nelson Algren Award for Fiction. She is the author of The Virginia Woolf Writers’ Workshop: Seven Lessons to Inspire Great Writing and Desert Elegy as well as a founder of the Big Sky Writing Workshops. An African in Imperial London, her biography of A.B.C. Merriman-Labor, a forgotten pioneer of African Literature, won the 2019 High Plains Book Award for Nonfiction. Her new book is The Girl Prince: Virginia Woolf, Race, and the Dreadnought Hoax.

Reviews

[Joe Foxford · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the story of Prince Sangany, otherwise known as Virginia Stephen/Woolf in later life.

In 1910 Virginia painted her face black and with a group of others managed to con her way onto the British Navy’s largest battleship, HMS Dreadnought whilst masquerading as an Abyssinian prince. A stunt that caught the attention of the world, but this isn’t just the story of Woolfs prince it’s a much deeper analysis of everything that came before that led to the moment she stepped foot onto the battleship and how her life was shaped in the decades after.

The book explores race and empire and draws attention to texts that span the centuries that all tie in with the creation of Sangany. Jones has really done her research not just telling one version of events, but multiple. Whilst also openly discussing how problematic some of these choices were.

There are deep dives into the state of empire before the stunt and after, how race was explored and exploited and how after everything Woolf became one of Britains most important modernist writers.

This is a pretty dense read as there is obviously a lot of source material to get through and at times we’re jumping across decades but it summarises the points well and you get a clear history of the state of 1900 Britain and the empire overall as well as Woolfs life before literature.

If you’re a fan of Woolfs work, this is definitely a book I’d recommend as it covers her life in a really fascinating way.

[Jules · Rating 4 out of 5]

Quite a decent recounting of the hoax but I found the author was reliant on speculative and tangential connections to tie some of the analysis about race back in (ie: such and such famous Black author lived in proximity to Woolf… might they have walked past each other? etc). I enjoyed a lot of the investigation of Black culture and art the author goes into but I think there was a better way to do this that didn’t feel like trying to pad the book out. I wish Una Marsden’s work had gotten more detail as well as what was mentioned seemed very interesting but was ultimately limited in scope. Very strong subject on the whole but the book would have benefited from a stronger thesis and commitment to a particular stance rather than a general shrug.

[ND · Rating 5 out of 5]

This might be my best read of 2024. I admit it is a bit of a specialty, but being a Woolf nut, I was amazed by an entire book about something that seems, at first glance, hardly worthy of an extended article. Jones gives deep context about race and racism in Britain, as well as a fascinating historiography of the hoax, down through the many decades since it happened. And leaves us with some fascinating questions, rather than all the answers. Brava, Danell Jones!

[Row Campbell · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5
Interesting account of a period in history, it did seem the author was highly disappointed in the subject for not having risen above the time and place she was born.

[christine · Rating 5 out of 5]

just realized (very belatedly) i have yet to review this, but it was a great read! jones provides a lot of context on the dreadnought hoax, from woolf's upbringing, family and political views to the rampant culture of exoticism sweeping "civilized" british society at the time it occurred. absorbing, quick & informative!