The Village in the Jungle

In a literary career spanning more than 60 years the highly pro­lific man of letters Leonard Woolf published hardly any fiction. Of the little he did produce by far the most important was The Village in the Jungle (1913), a debut novel set in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) of such literary accomplishment that it should have propelled him on a career to match his great contemporaries D H Lawrence or Thomas Hardy. Instead Woolf chose to devote himself to publishing fiction by his more famous wife, Virginia, while running the famous Hogarth Press. Despite being virtually unknown The Village in the Jungle is an important classic, rare among English novels of the Edwardian era. While most take the viewpoint of the coloniser, Woolf tells his tale of native life in a colonial outpost from the point of view of the colonised. It is also a tale of superstition and murder set against a backdrop of the jungle that threatens to swallow everything up in its path.