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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.