The first chapter focuses on Leonard Woolf’s journey from colonialist civil servant working on behalf of the British Empire in Ceylon, to writer and celebrated anti-imperialist. Looking closely at his correspondence and autobiographical reflections on the years 1904 to 1911, as well as the novel, The Village in the Jungle (1913), written upon his return to England, it details how Woolf’s encounters with animals gradually disrupt his human- and European-centred worldview. The chapter begins by examining Woolf’s role in both facilitating and partaking in the hunting of big game, through which his early attraction to shooting animals shifted to forceful critique of its imperialist, anthropocentric and commercial dimensions. It then explains how hunting in Woolf’s first novel is associated with gendered and racial violence. In the process, Woolf is placed in dialogue with postcolonial theory and histories of trophy hunting, and his approach is compared to that of George Orwell, Harry Storey and John Still among others.

Chapter 4 examines three instances where the juxtaposition of a man’s and a woman’s textual contributions aims to satisfy the modernist desire for androgyny. W. B. Yeats’s interest in androgyny is expressed through iconography that the artist Althea Gyles employed in her designs for the covers of his books The Secret Rose (1897) and Poems (1899), but it is also embodied by the material texts of those books themselves, which bring together a man’s words with a woman’s images. A similar collaborative dynamic is apparent in Marianne Moore’s 1936 volume The Pangolin and Other Verse, where poems that explore seemingly impossible meetings of difference work together with illustrations by the male artist George Plank to convey an androgynous vision. The chapter concludes by turning to the modernist writer most closely associated with androgyny, Virginia Woolf. Drawing on the famous image from A Room of One’s Own of a man and woman stepping into a taxi that spurs Woolf to write of the androgynous mind, I argue that Woolf’s dialogic “meeting” with her husband Leonard in their 1917 Hogarth Press volume Two Stories reflects her desire to achieve androgyny through cross-sex collaboration.

This chapter takes up the friends and enemies of the liberal world order of 1919, beginning with the anti-liberal provocations of the postwar avant-garde. At its center it focuses on the ambivalent relationship of Leonard and Virginia Woolf to liberal internationalism. I propose a new reading of the political Virginia Woolf as a writer devoted to rethinking liberal governance, rather than a critic writing “against empire,” and read her breakthrough anti-bildungsroman, Jacob’s Room, as an extended inquiry into liberal governmental order. I put Woolf’s approach to liberal government in dialogue with H. G. Wells’s World State fiction and his Outline of History, a major intellectual event of the postwar period.