Literary References in Woolf

Woolf makes several explicit literary references over the course of "Jaffna"; He directly casts Mrs Lewis as an archtypal character from a Jane Austen novel, likens the native Sinnatamby, as well as the white people around him, to characters from a Kipling novel - he goes so far as to say that 'I could never make up my mind whether Kipling had moulded his characters accurately in the image of Anglo-Indian society or whether we were moulding our characters accurately in the image of a Kipling story'.  Later on, he likens the 'profound melancholy and fatalism' lying beneath the surface of the natives to something that 'permeates the scenery and characters of a Hardy novel'.  The effect of this is to highlight the unreality and performity of the situation that Woolf finds himself in, such that he seems to be living in the pages of a work of fiction.  It makes his point that the Anglo-Indians are displaced people out of their natural habitat - echoes of Passage to India here.