A new look at a revolutionary writer, a diverse imperial city, and a controversial trick on the Royal Navy. In February 1910, the future Virginia Woolf played the most famous practical joke in British military history. Blackening her face and masquerading as an Abyssinian prince, the young writer and her friends conned their way onto HMS Dreadnought, the Empire’s most powerful battleship. The stunt made headlines around the world, embarrassed the Admiralty, and provoked debate in Parliament. But who was the ‘girl prince’ unidentified at the time, and what was she doing there? The Girl Prince intertwines three fascinating stories: a scandalous prank and its afterlife; Woolf’s ideas about race and empire; and the actual lived experience of Black people in Edwardian Britain, from real princes to Caribbean writers and South African activists. Using letters, diaries, reporting and newly discovered archives, Danell Jones describes an extraordinary chain of events, exploring why a boundary-pushing novelist once pulled a bigoted blackface prank, and what it tells us—about Woolf’s Britain and Woolf’s work. This is a tantalisingly fresh take on an iconic writer and her deeply problematic stunt.

In a world dominated by the British Empire, and at a time when many Europeans considered black people inferior, Sierra Leonean writer A. B. C. Merriman-Labor claimed his right to describe the world as he found it. He looked at the Empire's great capital and laughed. In this first biography of Merriman-Labor, Danell Jones describes the tragic spiral that pulled him down the social ladder from writer and barrister to munitions worker, from witty observer of the social order to patient in a state-run hospital for the poor. In restoring this extraordinary man to the pantheon of African observers of colonialism, she opens a window onto racial attitudes in Edwardian London. An African in Imperial London is a rich portrait of a great metropolis, writhing its way into a new century of appalling social inequity, world-transforming inventions, and unprecedented demands for civil rights. WINNER OF THE HIGH PLAINS BOOK AWARD FOR NONFICTION

In a world dominated by the British Empire, and at a time when many Europeans considered black people inferior, Sierra Leonean writer A. B. C. Merriman-Labor claimed his right to describe the world as he found it. He looked at the Empire's great capital and laughed. In this first biography of Merriman-Labor, Danell Jones describes the tragic spiral that pulled him down the social ladder from writer and barrister to munitions worker, from witty observer of the social order to patient in a state-run hospital for the poor. In restoring this extraordinary man to the pantheon of African observers of colonialism, she opens a window onto racial attitudes in Edwardian London. An African in Imperial London is a rich portrait of a great metropolis, writhing its way into a new century of appalling social inequity, world-transforming inventions, and unprecedented demands for civil rights. WINNER OF THE HIGH PLAINS BOOK AWARD FOR NONFICTION