Leonard Woolf: A Life, by Victoria Glendinning

Leonard Woolf: A Life Victoria Glendinning

You’d think maybe not much more could be written about Virginia Woolf and the group of early 20th century artists and intellectuals knows as Bloomsbury set? Wrong. Victoria Glendinning’s biography of Leonard Woolf brings to life a forgotten link in all this. Leonard Woolf was remarkable man, an author, publisher (the Hogarth Press), active in political and foreign affairs.

The Woolf family were Jews who came to the UK in the early 19th Century at a time of growing tolerance, when punitive racial laws were being, unlike other parts of Europe.

Interesting to me was his early life at Cambridge, where he was a member of The Apostles and met the leading lights of the time: Lytton Strachey, Clive Bell, John Maynard Keynes. Later he some years spent in the civil service in Ceylon. He gave up this careers and returned to England and married Virginia. VW’s mental illness meant their life was difficult and if it had not been for LW’s devotion and care VW would probably not have lived long enough to write her masterpieces. This has been speculated upon by others and seems to be true. He comes across as a ‘man for all seasons’, an urbane, cultivated man, ahead of his time in political and social attitudes; all the time enduring the entrenched antisemitism of the upper classes at the time.

His own writing included columns for the New Statesman and The Nation. He wrote also on subjects as far ranging as life in early 20th century colonial Ceylon and various political works and a 5 volume autobiography. LW lived a full, long life for another 28 years after VW’s death.

Thanks to LW a vast amount of Virginia’s diaries and letters were preserved and spawned a veritable industry of Bloomsbury research. VW had wanted them all destroyed.