At the end of 1907 she travelled to Ceylon to visit her brother, Leonard Woolf, then a junior civil servant stationed in Kandy.

In the following months she met Robert Heath Lock, Assistant Director of the Peradeniya Botanical Gardens, near Kandy.

[1] In August 1908, she went back to England with her brother, who was returning briefly before taking up a promotion as Assistant Government Agent of Hambantota.

She greatly enjoyed her life as the wife of a colonial civil servant and was fascinated by all the places she lived, which informed her writing, both fiction and what we would now call 'tourist guides'.

"It is unfortunate that so many natives are adopting English dress, blind to the fact that it destroys all their individuality and Oriental grace", she wrote, of Ceylon, and "Kandyan divorce laws are so enlightened that....".