Leonard S(idney) Woolf Biography

Dictionary of Literary Biography on Leonard S(idney) Woolf

Though less well known than his wife, Virginia, Leonard Woolf also had a remarkable career. His political education was multifaceted and complete, and despite success in the Ceylon civil service, he became a forceful critic of imperialism and an outstanding champion of the self-determination of third-world peoples. Contact with hideous London slums, totally alien to his boyhood, and with the desperate plight of working-class women led him to be a lifelong socialist and an early advocate of women's rights. World War I, which destroyed forever the old secure civilization he knew as a child, made him a proponent of the League of Nations, a hater of tyranny, and a student of the roots of war and the inadequacies of the human psyche that failed to match his own unflinching rationalism. Becoming a novelist before his wife, he soon abandoned fiction for literary journalism and political comment, producing some forty books and thousands of essays, only to turn his hand in old age to writing a classic autobiography (in five volumes beginning in 1960).

Read the rest of this Biography with our Leonard S(idney) Woolf Access Pass.