Wise Virgins

Born in London, Leonard Woolf received a Reform upbringing in the liberal Jewish milieu of London’s Kensington district. He studied at Cambridge University’s Trinity College, where he befriended several intellectuals and artists who would eventually make up the Bloomsbury group, an informal circle whose members individually and collectively comprised the vital center of political, social, and cultural progressive thought in interwar Britain. Woolf wed one of his Bloomsbury interlocutors, Virginia Stephen, and the pair maintained a complex but close bond as she went on to become England’s great modernist novelist under her married name Virginia Woolf. Leonard Woolf’s own forays into fiction ultimately took a back seat to a decades-long career as a political essayist, thinker, and editor on behalf of progressive causes. His work as an imperial civil servant in Ceylon (today Sri Lanka) prior to his marriage fed progressive and internationalist convictions early, and these deepened further during the catastrophe of World War I. During the war, Woolf wrote reports for Britain’s ethical socialist Fabian Society that would serve as foundational sources for the League of Nations and later the United Nations. In 1917, the Woolfs founded Hogarth Press to publish Virginia Woolf’s writing as well as other literature and scholarship from their colleagues in the Bloomsbury group. Leonard Woolf remained an owner of the publishing house until 1946, by which time the press had published more than five hundred volumes. In the same period, Woolf wrote for a wide array of progressive periodicals, including the Nation, New Statesman, and Political Quarterly, while also taking an active role in Britain’s democratic socialist Labour Party for much of his career.