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Overview
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.
Synopsis
This meticulously researched and compassionately rendered portrait of Leonard Woolf, the “dark star” of Bloomsbury, is the first to capture his troubled relationship with his wife, his own intellect, and the tumultuous world of artists and eccentrics around him. A man of extremes, Woolf was by turns ferocious and tender, violent and repressed, opinionated and nonjudgmental, always an outsider of sorts within the exceptionally intimate, fractious, and sometimes vicious society of brilliant but troubled friends and lovers. In telling Woolf's story, Victoria Glendinning traces the development of the Bloomsbury circle, bringing to life the group's literary and personal discussions. She also provides an unprecedented account of Woolf's marriage to the legendary Virginia, revealing his undying creative and emotional support for her amid her numerous breakdowns. Leonard Woolf is a perceptive and lively biography of a man whose far-reaching influence is long overdue the full appreciation Glendinning provides.
The New York Times - Claire Messud
After meeting Leonard Woolf for the first time, in 1911, the poet Rupert Brooke asked of him, "Was Woolf, who seems very nice, ever more than minor?" Brutal though this seems, it may reflect the consensus over time: he remains a figure best known for those to whom he was attached—his wife Virginia, of course, but also his close friends in the Bloomsbury set, including Lytton Strachey, John Maynard Keynes and Clive Bell.
As Victoria Glendinning makes clear in her comprehensive and eminently readable biography, it is an assessment born of ignorance of his varied accomplishments—perhaps, indeed, born of the fact that his accomplishments were so varied—and of the quiet complexity of his character, which was at once passionate, reserved and, above all, stoical.
Editorials
Claire Messud
After meeting Leonard Woolf for the first time, in 1911, the poet Rupert Brooke asked of him, "Was Woolf, who seems very nice, ever more than minor?" Brutal though this seems, it may reflect the consensus over time: he remains a figure best known for those to whom he was attached—his wife Virginia, of course, but also his close friends in the Bloomsbury set, including Lytton Strachey, John Maynard Keynes and Clive Bell.As Victoria Glendinning makes clear in her comprehensive and eminently readable biography, it is an assessment born of ignorance of his varied accomplishments—perhaps, indeed, born of the fact that his accomplishments were so varied—and of the quiet complexity of his character, which was at once passionate, reserved and, above all, stoical.
—The New York Times