Leonard Woolf

Other names: 

Leonard Sidney Woolf

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Date of birth: 
25 Nov 1880
City of birth: 
London
Country of birth: 
England
Date of death: 
14 Aug 1969
Location of death: 
Monk's House, Rodmell, Sussex
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About: 

Leonard Sidney Woolf was born in Kensington, London, to Sidney Woolf QC and Marie de Jongh. He studied at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he befriended Saxon Sydney-Turner, Lytton Strachey, Clive Bell, and Thoby Stephen (son of Sir Leslie Stephen, brother of Virginia and Vanessa). Out of these friendships of the so-called 'Apostles' the 'Bloomsbury Group' emerged.

In 1904, Woolf joined the Colonial Civil Service in Ceylon but resigned in 1912 because of his growing disillusionment with imperialism, but also because he had fallen in love with Virginia Stephen. Leonard and Virginia married in 1912 and Virginia took Leonard's family name. After Virginia's death in 1941, Woolf continued to oversee and publish her uncollected essays and a selection of her diaries.

Woolf was a member of the Fabian Society and in 1916 wrote two Fabian reports that were to become part of the basis of the League of Nations. His anti-imperialism, socialism, and internationalism found expression in a number of books and pamphlets, and from 1919 to 1945 he served as secretary to the Labour Party's advisory committees on international and imperial questions. Woolf also became involved in editing the Nation, the Political Quarterly and the New Statesman. More significantly, he and Virginia established the Hogarth Press in 1917. In 1942, he provided the Introduction to Mulk Raj Anand's Letters to India. 

Leonard Woolf suffered a stroke and died on 14 August 1969 at Monk's House, a cottage in Rodmell he and Virginia had bought in 1919.

Connections: 

Ahmed Ali, Mulk Raj Anand, Clive Bell, Vanessa Bell, Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson, T. S. Eliot, E. M. Forster, Roger Fry, Duncan Grant, Robert Graves, Hsiao Ch'ien, Aldous Huxley, John Maynard Keynes, Harold Laski, Desmond MacCarthy, G. E. Moore, Herbert Read, Bertrand Russell, Nikhil Sen, Ranjee Shahani, Thoby Stephen, Lytton Strachey, Saxon Sydney-Turner, Virginia Woolf.

Network: 
Mulk Raj Anand
Ahmed Ali
Organizations: 
Fabians
Hogarth Press
New Statesman
Penguin Books
The Listener
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Published works: 

The Village in the Jungle (London: Edward Arnold, 1913)

The Wise Virgins: A Story of Words, Opinions, and a Few Emotions (London: Edward Arnold, 1914)

Co-Operation and the Future of Industry (London: Allen & Unwin, 1918) 

Economic Imperialism (London and New York: Swarthmore, 1920)

Empire and Commerce in Africa: A Study in Economic Imperialism (London: Allen & Unwin, 1920)

Mandates and Empire (League of Nations Union, 1920)

International Co-Operative Trade (London: Fabian, 1922)

After the Deluge: A Study of Communal Psychology (London: Hogarth Press, 1931)

The Intelligent Man's Way to Prevent War (London: Gollancz, 1933)

(with Mary Adams) The Modern State (London: Allen & Unwin, 1933)

(with Virginia Woolf) Quack, Quack!: Essays on Unreason and Superstition in Poltics, Belief and Thought (London: Leonard and Virginia Woolf, 1935)

After the Deluge, Vol. 2 (London: Hogarth Press, 1939)

Barbarians at the Gate (London: Victor Gollancz, 1939)

The Hotel (London: Hogarth Press, 1939)

The War for Peace (London: Routledge, 1940)

Foreign Policy: The Labour Party's Dilemma (London: Fabian Publications, 1947)

Principia Politica: A Study of Communal Psychology (London: Hogarth Press, 1953)

Sowing: An Autobiography of the Years 1880-1904 (London: Hogarth Press, 1960)

Growing: An Autobiography of the Years 1904-1911 (London: Hogarth Press, 1961)

Diaries in Ceylon, 1908-1911. Records of a Colonial Administrator. Being the Official Diaries Maintained by Leonard Woolf While Assistant Government Agent of the Hambantota District, Ceylon, During the Period August 1908 to May 1911. Edited with a Preface by Leonard Woolf. And, Stories from the East: Three Short Stories on Ceylon by Leonard Woolf (Dehiwala, 1962)

Beginning Again: An Autobiography of the Years 1911-1918 (London: Hogarth Press, 1964)

A Calendar of Consolation: A Comforting Thought for Every Day in the Year (London: Hogarth Press, 1967)

Downhill All the Way: An Autobiography of the Years 1919-1939 (London: Hogarth Press, 1967)

The Journey Not the Arrival Matters: An Autobiography of the Years 1939-1969 (London: Hogarth Press, 1969)

In Savage Times: Leonard Woolf on Peace and War (Garland Publishing Inc, [1925-1944] 1973)

(with Frederic Spotts) Letters of Leonard Woolf (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1989)

(with Trekkie Ritchie Parsons and Judith Adamson) Love Letters (London: Chatto & Windus, 2001)

A Tale Told by Moonlight (London: Hesperus, 2006)

Contributions to periodicals: 

Nation

Nation and Athenaeum (literary editor, 1923-30)

New Statesman

Political Quarterly (co-founder)

Secondary works: 

Bell, Quentin, Virginia Woolf: A Biography (London: Hogarth, 1972)

Boehmer, Elleke, Empire, the Nation and the Postcolonial (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002)

Coates, Irene, Who's Afraid of Leonard Woolf?: A Case for the Sanity of Virginia Woolf (New York: SoHo Press, 2000)

Cole, M., 'Woolf, Leonard Sidney', in Joyce M. Bellamy and John Saville (eds) Dictionary of Labour Biography, Vol. 5 (London: Macmillan, 1979)

Crick, Bernard R., Robson, William Alexander and Woolf, Leonard, Protest and Discontent (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970)

De Silva, M. C. W. Prabhath, Leonard Woolf, A British Civil Servant as a Judge in the Hambantora District of Colonial Sri Lanka, 1908-1911 (Kandy, Sri Lanka: M. C. W. P. de Silva, 1996)

Funke, Sarah, Virginia & Leonard Woolf (New York: Glenn Horowitz Bookseller, 2002)

Glendinning, Victoria, Leonard Woolf (London: Simon & Schuster, 2006)

Lee, Hermione, Virginia Woolf: A Biography (London: Chatto & Windus, 1996)

Luedeking, Leila, and Edmonds, Michael, Leonard Woolf: A Bibliography (Winchester: St Paul's Bibliographies, 1992)

Meyerowitz, Selma S., Leonard Woolf (Boston: Twayne, 1982)

Ondaatje, Christopher, Woolf in Ceylon: An Imperial Journey in the Shadow of Leonard Woolf, 1904-1911 (Toronto, Ont.: HarperCollins, 2005)

Rosenbaum, S. P., Edwardian Bloomsbury (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1994)

Rosenbaum, S. P., Georgian Bloomsbury: The Early Literary History of the Bloomsbury Group, 1910-1914 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003)

Rosenbaum, S. P., Victorian Bloomsbury: The Early Literary History of the Bloomsbury Group (London: Macmillan, 1987)

Rosenbaum, S. P., 'Woolf, Leonard Sidney (1880-1960)', Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, 2004) [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/37019]

Rosenfeld, Natania, Outsiders Together: Virginia and Leonard Woolf (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000)

Seaburg, Alan, 52 Tavistock Square: Poems (Cambridge, MA: Anne Miniver Press, 1994)

Spater, George, and Parsons, Ian, A Marriage of True Minds: An Intimate Portrait of Leonard and Virginia Woolf (London: Hogarth Press, 1977)

Willis, J. H., Leonard and Virginia Woolf as Publishers: The Hogarth Press, 1917-41 (Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia, 1992)

Wilson, Duncan, and Eisenberg, J., Leonard Woolf: A Political Biography (London: Hogarth Press, 1978)

Wilson, Jean Moorcroft, Leonard Woolf: Pivot or Outsider of Bloomsbury (London: Cecil Woolf, 1994)

Wilson, Peter, The International Theory of Leonard Woolf (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003)

Woolf, Virginia, The Letters of Virginia Woolf (London: Hogarth, 1980)

Woolf, Virginia, Bell, Anne Olivier and McNeillie, Andrew, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, 5 vols (London: Hogarth, 1977-1984)

Woolmer, J. Howard, and Gaither, Mary E., Checklist of the Hogarth Press, 1917-1946, new and revised edn (Winchester: St Paul's Bibliographies, 1986)

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Archive source: 

Correspondence and literary papers, Berg Collection of the New York Public Library

Correspondence, family papers and literary Mss, University of Sussex Special Collections

University of Texas, Austin

Letters to John Lehmann, Add. MS 56234, British Library, St Pancras

Letters to Saxon Sydney-Turner, Huntington Library, San Marino, California

Letters to Julian Bell, King's College Archive Centre, Cambridge

Letters to John Maynard Keynes and Lady Keynes, King's College Archive Centre, Cambridge

Letters to G. H. W. Rylands, King's College Archive Centre, Cambridge

Charleston Papers, King's College, Cambridge

Letters to William Plomer, University of Durham Library

Letters to Norah Smallwood, Brotherton Library, University of Leeds

Hogarth Press Archives, University of Reading

Monks House Papers, University of Sussex Special Collections

'Leonard Woolf', BBC Radio 3, 17 February 1970, P503R, National Sound Archive, British Library

Performance recordings, National Sound Archive, British Library