British writer
Alternative Title: Leonard Sidney Woolf
Leonard Woolf, in full Leonard Sidney Woolf, (born Nov. 25, 1880, London—died Aug. 14, 1969, Rodmell, Sussex, Eng.), British man of letters, publisher, political worker, journalist, and internationalist who influenced literary and political life and thought more by his personality than by any one achievement.
Woolf's most enduring accomplishment was probably his autobiography, an expression of the toughness of moral fibre and quality of mind and spirit that made him one of the outstanding men of his time. Its first three volumes, Sowing (1960), Growing (1961), and Beginning Again (1964), re-create the world of liberal Jewry into which he was born, the intellectual excitement of life at the University of Cambridge in the early years of the 20th century, the experience as a civil servant in Ceylon (1904–11) that made him an anti-imperialist, and the atmosphere of the Bloomsbury group of artists and writers, in which he and his wife, novelist Virginia Woolf, played a formative part. In 1917 they founded their own publishing house, the Hogarth Press, and their discerning understanding encouraged such writers as T.S. Eliot and E.M. Forster.
The last volumes of the autobiography (Downhill All the Way, 1967; The Journey Not the Arrival Matters, 1969) span the years 1919 to 1969, a period during which Woolf exercised a certain amount of political influence through editorial activity on left-wing and internationalist journals and through his writings. His work helped to lay the foundations of the policy of the League of Nations and the United Nations and of the welfare state.
This article was most recently revised and updated by Michael Ray, Associate Editor.
Virginia Woolf: Early fiction
In the summer of 1911, Leonard Woolf returned from the East. After he resigned from the colonial service, Leonard and Virginia married in August 1912. She continued to work on her first novel; he wrote the anticolonialist novel The Village in the Jungle (1913) and The Wise Virgins (1914), a…
Bloomsbury group
…Maynard Keynes, the Fabian writer Leonard Woolf, and the novelist and critic Virginia Woolf. Other members were Desmond Macarthy, Arthur Waley, Saxon Sidney-Turner, Robert Trevelyan, Francis Birrell, J.T. Sheppard (later provost of King's College), and the critic Raymond Mortimer and the sculptor Stephen Tomlin, both Oxford men. Bertrand Russell, Aldous…
John Lehmann
… (1978) details his difficulties with Leonard Woolf at the Hogarth Press. Lehmann also published a biography of the poet Rupert Brooke in 1980.…
Virginia Woolf, English writer whose novels, through their nonlinear approaches to narrative, exerted a major influence on the genre. While she is best known for her novels, especially Mrs. Dalloway (1925) and To the Lighthouse (1927), Woolf also wrote pioneering essays on artistic theory, literary…
London 1970s overview
As Britain's finances spiraled downward and the nation found itself suppliant to the International Monetary Fund, the seeming stolidity of 1970s London concealed various, often deeply opposed, radical trends. The entrepreneurial spirit of independent record labels anticipated the radical economic…
More About Leonard Woolf
3 references found in Britannica articles
marriage to Virginia Woolf
In Virginia Woolf: Early fiction
association with
In Bloomsbury group
In John Lehmann
Rodmell, England
notable family members
spouse Virginia Woolf
Spartacus Educational - Biography of Leonard Woolf
Leonard Woolf - Student Encyclopedia (Ages 11 and up)
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