Leonard Woolf: A Biography Paperback - 2008

Excerpt

1
In the Beginning

Having a child is problematic, wrote Leonard Woolf when in his eighties, and childless. It concerns the “new human being” as much as its parents, since this new human being is born without having given its consent. One should think twice, “from the point of view of the hypothetical child.” He himself was born, without his consent, on 25 November 1880. There he is, Leonard Sidney Woolf, in the Census returns for 1881, a five-month-old baby.

Everyone, holding a baby, has to wonder what life holds in store for him. No one could have foreseen what would happen to this one. He grew up to become a core member of a group of intimate and talented friends who continue to inspire interest and analysis a century later. In his early twenties, as a colonial servant, he administered ten thousand square miles of village and jungle. He became an anti-imperialist, a Marxist “of a sort” and a socialist, and was an éminence grise of the early Labour Party in Britain as it became a party of government. His adult life spanned the two world wars; his writings informed the charter of the League of Nations and, as polemical journalist, as editor and author, his lifelong mission was to prevent the barbarism and insanity of future war through international cooperation and collective security.

His anguished intelligence saw all too clearly both the failure of this great project, and what he saw as the failure of the Left in Britain. He had his own demons to fight in public and in private life, being a man of extremes and contradictions: ferocious and tender, violent and self-restrained, opinionated and nonjudgmental. Belief in reason pulled him one way, irrational passion another. He was disconcerting, inner-directed, attractive, always an outsider. The constants in his character were honesty, persistence and energy. He played all games, competitively. He was a dedicated gardener. He had an affinity with animals. Nonstop work — at his writing, at his political activities, in the garden — came naturally to him.

He liked women, and women liked him. (“I have always been greatly attracted to the undiluted female mind, as well as to the female body.”) With his wife, he founded the Hogarth Press. He had no idea when he married Virginia Stephen how her mental instability would determine and distort his own trajectory, nor that she would become one of the most famous English authors of the twentieth century. He knew how to love, and she was the love of his life. After her suicide came change and a new attachment. In his last decade, five volumes of autobiography won him respect and recognition. He left not only distinguished books on international relations, but also satirical squibs, a great mass of literary and political journalism, a play, poetry, short stories, and two novels.

Eclipsed in the literary canon, and in the public imagination, by the illustriousness of Virginia Woolf — his family name, when standing alone, commonly signifying her, not him — he is a dark star. “You cannot escape Fate,” he wrote at the end of his life, “and Fate, I have always felt, is not in the future, but in the past.”


From the Hardcover edition.

Media reviews

“Comprehensive and eminently readable . . . Victoria Glendinning has given us the measure — noble, engaged and quietly passionate — of the man.” — New York Times Book Review

“Victoria Glendinning has brought this admirable, principled and singularly appealing man exquisitely to life.” — Globe and Mail

“Exemplary . . . This lucid biography is enhanced by Glendinning’s humane and perceptive insight into Woolf’s conflicted personality as well as by her assessment of his signal role in the literary flowering and political issues of the early 20th century.” — Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“Exhaustive, intelligent and entertaining . . . superb.” — Winnipeg Free Press

“A thoroughly researched and elucidating account.” — The New Yorker

“He was an exemplary figure: balanced yet passionate, practical, generous and wise. Victoria Glendinning’s biography fills out the picture with a brilliant lightness of touch that takes into account the darknesses and depths of this remarkable man. . . . Moreover, she writes so well that we trust her.” — The Guardian
  
“It would be difficult to ask much more from a biography than what Victoria Glendinning offers in this.” — Edmonton Journal

“Her deft writing and striking sympathy for her subject make this a landmark biography.” — The Observer (U.K.)

“As a political thinker, a writer and a husband, Woolf mattered . . . as Victoria Glendinning’s biography illustrates in an irresistibly fascinating fashion.” — Vancouver Sun

“I never noticed the passage of time while I was reading this absorbing biography.” — The Spectator

“Victoria Glendinning is that rarity among biographers: an admirable stylist.” — Irish Times

“An astonishingly good life story of Leonard Woolf . . . Glendinning’s richly detailed portrait of Woolf comes alive.” — London Free Press

“At last, [Leonard Woolf] gets a full account of his life by an accomplished and sympathetic biographer.” — National Post

“Victoria Glendinning has done a captivating job of grabbing Leonard’s arm and hauling him out from under the shadow of his famous wife. . . . Glendinning has written more than a biography; she’s penned a wonderful love story whose denouement could be right out of Virginia’s classic novel, Mrs. Dalloway.” — Calgary Herald

“Leonard Woolf is one of the great unsung heroes of the 20th century. . . . It needed a biography as compelling as this to bring out Woolf’s full stature. Many will rate this as Glendinning’s finest biography.” — The Independent

“This much is certain: His life is very much worth reading about. In Victoria Glendinning he has found a sympathetic and able biographer.” — Toronto Star


From the Hardcover edition.