Product Description

Many people today know Leonard Woolf mainly through the surname of his wife, Virginia, or his role in supporting her through her mental illness, depicted in films like "The Hours". Some critics see him as his wife's oppressor. In Victoria Glendinning's biography, for the first time we see the whole man. As well as being a prominent member of the Bloomsbury group, Leonard was a formidable figure in his own right, first as an innovative civil administrator in Ceylon, then as a writer, leading light of the Fabian society and publisher of TS Eliot, EM Forster, Robert Graves, Katherine Mansfield and of course Virginia Woolf. He was interested in everything and knew everybody. The achievement of Glendinning's book is to make its readers wish that they knew him too.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #355874 in Books
• Published on: 2006-09-04
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 464 pages

The Spectator, 7/10
'I never noticed the passage of time while I was reading this
absorbing biography'

Paul Levy, Guardian 22/9
'A landmark biography'

Irish Times 30/9
'Victoria Glendinning is that rarity among biographers: an
admirable stylist'

Customer Reviews

A Journey that matters
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.

Poor
A very poor attempt at a life of Leonard Woolf in which the central character is constantly forced into the shadows by the figure of his wife. For a good introduction to Leonard's life and work (Glendinning hasn't a clue about his opposition to imperialism) try Frederick Spotts's edition of Leonard's Letters (1989). Very fine.

Very disappointed
I've just been sent an advance copy of this book and am very disappointed at the poor standard of writing and scholarship it displays. Glendinning gushes, which is unpalatable enough, but she also makes a large number of errors, which any Bloomsbury addict will be able to spot.