Award-winning biographer Victoria Glendinning draws on her deep
knowledge of the twentieth century literary scene, and on her meticulous
research into previously untapped sources, to write the first full
biography of the extraordinary man who was the "dark star" at the center
of the Bloomsbury set, and the definitive portrait of the Woolf
marriage. A man of extremes, Leonard Woolf was ferocious and tender,
violent and self-restrained, opinionated and nonjudgmental, always an
outsider of sorts within the exceptionally intimate, fractious, and
sometimes vicious society of brilliant but troubled friends and lovers.
He has been portrayed either as Virginia's saintly caretaker or as her
oppressor, the substantial range and influence of his own achievements
overshadowed by Virginia's fame and the tragedy of her suicide. But
Leonard was a pivotal figure of his age, whose fierce intelligence
touched the key literary and political events that shaped the early
decades of the twentieth century and would resonate into the post-World
War II era.
Glendinning beautifully evokes Woolf 's coming-of-age in
turn-of-the-century London. The scholarship boy from a prosperous Jewish
family would cut his own path through the world of the British public
school, contending with the lingering anti-Semitism of Imperial Age
Britain. Immediately upon entering Trinity College, Cambridge, Woolf
became one of an intimate group of vivid personalities who would form
the core of the Bloomsbury circle: the flamboyant Lytton Strachey; Toby
Stephen, "the Goth," through whom Leonard would meet Stephen's sister
Virginia; and Clive Bell. Glendinning brings to life their long nights
of intense discussion of literature and the vicissitudes of sex, and
charts Leonard's course as he becomes the lifelong friend of John
Maynard Keynes and E. M. Forster.
She unearths the crucial influence of Woolf 's seven years as a
headstrong administrator in colonial Ceylon, where he lost confidence in
the imperial mission, deciding to abandon Ceylon in order to marry the
psychologically troubled Virginia Stephen. Glendinning limns the true
nature of Leonard's devotion to Virginia, revealing through vivid
depiction of their unconventional marriage how Leonard supported
Virginia through her breakdowns and in her writing. In co-founding with
Virginia the Hogarth Press, he provided a secure publisher for
Virginia's own boldly experimental works.
As the éminence grise of the early Labour Party, working behind the
scenes, Woolf became a leading critic of imperialism, and his passionate
advocacy of collective security to prevent war underpinned the charter
of the League of Nations. After Virginia's death, he continued to forge
his own iconoclastic way, engaging in a long and happy relationship with
a married woman.
Victoria Glendinning's Leonard Woolf is a major achievement -- a
shrewdly perceptive and lively portrait of a complex man of extremes and
contradictions in whom passion fought with reason and whose far-reaching
influence is long overdue for the full appreciation Glendinning offers
in this important book.
