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Leonard Woolf: A Biography

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I have just finished reading this biography and have nothing for it but praise. Like many other admirers of Virginia Woolf, I have read many critical analyses of her work, including three biographies, as well as Michael Holroyd's canonical biography of Lytton Strachey and numerous historical works on Bloomsbury (full disclosure; I teach English literature). Yet I had never read any work about Leonard Woolf, for the very good reason that comparatively little has been written about him; he has for the most part remained a shadowy figure, the man behind the legend.

Glendinning remedies this gap in the record. Her biography is detailed, thoughtful, sympathetic and objective, and brings Leonard Woolf to life, particularly the Leonard Woolf who lived and continued to work and write in the years after Virginia Woolf's death. Of course, a good part of this history is devoted to Leonard's life with Virginia, since their marriage was the central relationship in his life and the source of much of his creative energy. Yet in describing his experiences in Ceylon in the early 1900s, where he served in the British foreign service, his political work, including his influence on the League of Nations; his role in the creation of the British Labour Party; and his contributions as editor, not merely of the legendary Hogarth Press, which he founded with Virginia, but also of the political journal, The New Stateman, Glendenning has provided us not only with a history of the development of the British left, but also with a portrait of a unique individual, a person notable in his own right for his vision, wisdom and humanity. Glendenning quotes an associate as describing Woolf as "the only man I ever met who seemed to me to be right about everything that matters." I read this book because of my interest in Virginia Woolf; I came away with an appreciation for Leonard Woolf as a separate, remarkable person.

This book was highly praised in an outstanding review written by Adam Kirsch in ' The New York Sun'. Glendenning's biography according to him reveals a personality far more gifted, talented, and active than ordinarily supposed.Woolf was an important political journalist and a major contributor to the work of the socialist Fabian society. Most of us have the idea of Woolf as the faithful, and caring husband of the deeply troubled, frequently depressed Virginia Woolf. And there is no doubt that that chapter of his life in which he cared for his novelist wife is the part of his story the reading public will always take greatest interest in. But his talents were also appreciated by many other well- known writers who worked with Hogarth Press. Woolf was not as many supposed an asexual aesthete but a man whose involvements prior to Woolf , and after involved a successful physical component.
All his efforts and care helped Woolf write her most important work. It could not prevent her however from taking her own life. In probably one of the most moving suicide - notes ever written she thanks him for the great happiness he has given him, exonerates of any blame he might possibly have placed upon himself for her death- and expresses her abiding love and appreciation to him.
One problematic area as Kirsch explains was Woolf's relation to his own Jewishness, which he was apologetic and defensive about in a way Einstein, Freud, and Kafka never were. Woolf suffered his wife's slights and insults on his Jewishness, and in the beginning of their married life even distanced himself somewhat from his own family. After her death and with the companion of his later years he in 1957 visited Israel, and was moved by this. After this he became somewhat of a defender of the Jewish state, and one of his last public actions was writing a letter in its defense.
Woolf was a much respected and valued friend of many of the leading literary luminaries of his day, from Lytton Strachey to T.S. Eliot. His autobiography in five volumes and his novel set in Ceylon are considered first- class works.
This biography should go some way towards correcting the impression that he was more than just, what he nonetheless will be mostly remembered as Mr. Virgina Woolf.

When I was a young graduate student in English, Leonard Woolf was a feminist punching bag-the oppressive middle-class husband of the brilliant, ethereal Virginia Woolf. No one seemed to consider that living with someone mentally ill before the age of antipsychotic and mood stabilizing medication could have been somewhat of a struggle or that a little stolidness might provide Mrs. Woolf with the stable environement she needed in order to write.
Over the years Leonard has begun to get his due It was when reading William Zinsner's On Writing Well and Jon Hassler's "Simon's Night" that I discovered Woolf's evocative memoirs.
Now Victoria Glendinning who has written incredibly readable biographies of Vita Sackville-West and Anthony Trollope has turned her attention to Leonard Woolf and written a fabulous book about how he managed to deal with a wife who was often ill and remain a force in both literature and politics. The chapter on how he fielded requests for interviews, doctoral candidates, and Edward Albee's request that "I be able to use your wife's name in a play I'm writing" as his wife's reputation grew is fascinating as well

Leonard Woolf is little known in the USA outside of the ivy walls of the academy. Woolf (1880-1969) was the husband of the famous Virginia Woolf (1880-1941). Victoria Glendinning, the well-known British biographer
devotes this new work to Woolf.
Leonard was born to upper middle-class Jews in Putney. His father was a judge who died at the age of 47. Leonard grew up in the crowded company of eight siblings. Woolf attended Cambridge becoming close friends with Lytton Strachey and a bohemian group of intellectuals. Following his graduation he embarked for a seven year tour of duty in the British colonial service. Woolf was stationed in Ceylon (today it is Sri Lanka) where he found material for his famous novel "The Village in the Jungle." The novel is still popular in Sri Lanka and has been filmed. During this time he became a keen anti-imperialist. Woolf was a tough administrator to the natives he governed. He returned to England for a long life of intellectual work in the fields of history, politics and anti-war agitation.
It was through her Cambridge brother Thoby that Virginia Stephens first met Woolf. Virginia was the daughter of her famous father editor Leslie Stephens. Her siblings were Vanessa her painting sister, Thoby and Adrian. Though she was anti-semitic she fell in love with Leonard. The couple wed in 1912.
The marriage was sexless. Virginia had a short affair with the author Vita Sackville-West basing the character of "Orlando" on her. Virginia devoted her life to writing such classics as"The Waves"; "Mrs. Dalloway"
"To the Lighthouse"; "A Room of One's Own: and "The Long Voyage Out." She was a literary reviewer and taught briefly. Virginia was also always in danger of madness. During the marriage she experienced deep depressions, suicide- attempts and had to be handled with gentle care. Leonard kept her alive through a long marriage. He was faithful to her even though she was a lesbian who had no interest in heterosexual relationships.
Leonard helped found the Labour Party; worked for women's rights and was the editor of the Political Quarterly and other left wing journals. He continued to write about world economics and was adept at keeping the small Hogarth Press in operation. Leonard and Virginia founded the Hogarth Press which published such avante-garden authors as Sigmund Freud, Thomas Sterne Elliot and several of the Bloomsbury set including John Maynard Keynes. Literary men such as E.M, Forster were friends of the Woolfs. Leonard was also friendly with Beatrice and Sydney Webb the famous socialists. He never joined the communist party and opposed Leonard Mosley and his British fascists supporters prior to World War II.
Leonard was a Jew but became a staunch atheist. He loved gardening, classical music, animals and long walks in the Sussex countryside. The couple lived in Rothermil Village at "The Monks" located within fifty miles of downtown London. After Virginia's suicide by drowning in the Ri in 1941 he never remarried. Leonard did have a longterm relationship with a married woman Trekkie Parsons.
Many general readers will not want to spend moeny on a man few Americans know or care about. I picked up the book because of my interest in Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury set. Nevertheless, I did enjoy this book about a good man who was a loyal and true husband, a lover of peace and a kind and gentle soul.

Some forty years ago I was entranced by the five volumes of Leonard Woolf's autobiography and impressed by his character and views. The details are a bit vague in my mind after all that time, and I was looking forward to refreshing them by reading Victoria Glendinning's biography. Occasionally I dipped again into the autobiography to compare her account with his. I have to say that, for me, her work does not match the charm or the fluency of his. She is one of those biographers who cannot omit even the most trivial and uninteresting information she has, not only about her subject but also about other people in the story.

She has of course much to add to, and occasionally to correct, what Leonard Woolf has written himself, since she can bring in what other people have written to and about him. In particular she can say things about his personality that he would hardly have said himself. So she can portray him as often conscious, quite painfully so, of an outsider status even when he was apparently successfully integrated into the groups of which he was a member. He himself had spoken of having quite early on developed a `carapace' with which to protect himself, though he did not explain what he was protecting himself against. In his autobiography he says that he first developed it as a schoolboy at St. Paul's, and some pages later suggested that it was to protect himself from being considered an intellectual. That was most unlikely at as intellectually high-achieving a school as St Paul's; and he never recorded, as other Old Paulines like Compton Mackenzie and G.K. Chesterton were to do, that boys were often bullied at the St Paul's of those days for being Jewish. He did compare himself, allusively and without further elaboration, to a species of moth oddly called the `Setaceous (i.e. bristly) Hebrew Character' - a reference which Victoria Glendinning did not pick up. Only in the fifth and last volume of his autobiography does he say that he had `always been conscious of being a Jew', but claimed that antisemitism had `not touched me personally or only very peripherally.' When we consider that his wife Virginia frequently expressed her distaste for Jews, even in his hearing, we can see how much suppression there was at work in such a remark. In his second novel, The Wise Virgins, sharing in the readiness to hurt that was a characteristic of the Bloomsbury set, he even mocked his own Jewish family (as Virginia did), and showed the central character, himself, as `displaced ... and fitting in nowhere' (Glendinning's words.) But in that novel he was equally scathing about the `bloodless' Bloomsbury characters.

The Bloomsbury Circle of which he was a part were notoriously uninhibited in expressing themselves. Leonard Woolf was close to the flamboyant Lytton Strachey, and their early correspondence was dripping with their sexual drives and in particular with Strachey's flaunting his homosexual activities. Leonard contributed his share of activities, though these were, until his (sexually unsatisfactory) marriage, with female prostitutes: one feels that he was under a compulsion to prove to his friend that he was not inhibited either.

He did make a devoted husband. (Victoria Glendinning does not agree with the few writers of who have doubted this.) Though Leonard had known before he married her that Virginia had had breakdowns, nothing could have prepared him for the severity and frequency of her attacks during the next 29 years, which were a terrible ordeal for him also. At one time her rages were directed at him, and he would move out of their home for a while for both their sakes. She (and others in the circle) found his involvement with the Women's Cooperative Guild and with the Fabians a dreary waste of time; for him, `drugging himself with work', it helped him a little to cope. But most of the time Virginia knew how much she owed to his love and reciprocated it; and she was desperately anxious for his good opinions of her books. Incidentally, while we are told, for example, that `in 1923 Virginia had three new hats, two pairs of drawers, two pairs of shoes, two cloaks, one coat, one dress, one skirt and one jumper', there is no appraisal whatever in this book of the nature of her genius. Nor, for that matter, is there a detailed enough discussion of the content of Leonard's pre-1933 political and literary writings and various editorships which were (apart from the Hogarth Press) the main source of his income.

The impact of Virginia's suicide on Leonard is movingly described. He was devastated; but within two years, at the age of 63, he fell in love with the artist Trekkie Parsons, with whom he had `a long and lovely autumn' (as Quentin Bell would write to her after his death). Trekkie, as robust as Virginia had been frail, was married to Ian, a director of the publishing house Chatto & Windus with which the Hogarth Press would eventually merge. They had a strong marriage and she had no intention of leaving him, although she loved Leonard, too. When Ian was posted to France, Trekkie came to live with Leonard at Rodmell. Ian accepted this, and when he returned from the war, Trekkie would spend the weekend with him in a house they had found near Leonard's home in Rodmell and the rest of the week with Leonard. Leonard still worked productively, and his brother found him `looking the picture of contented old age' and many young people, especially women, found him a lovable old man. He travelled, with Trekkie, to Ceylon in his 80th year to revisit the places where he had worked as a young colonial civil servant; and to the US and Canada when he was 85. He remained physically spry and mentally alert to almost the very end of his life four years later. Victoria Glendinning has taken us through a remarkable life.

As a reader and admirer of The Bloomsbury Group and also an admirer of the writing of the biographer, Victoria Glendinning, I recommend VITA: A Biography of Vita Sackville-West. Sackville-West and her husband, Harold Nicolson, had extra-marital affairs, she with Virginia Woolf and Violet Trefusis.I hope this short note on Glendinning will lead others to her works including her latest on Leonard Woolf.

The New Bio of Leonard Woolf is good reading and reveals things we didn't know about him, believe it or not. Quite a few surprises.