Introduction

Of all the rich, intriguing personalities who came together at the beginning of the twentieth century to form the now infamous Bloomsbury Group, none is perhaps as paradoxically central and marginal as Leonard Woolf. As one of the close circle of friends around Thoby Stephen at the turn of the century, he certainly counts, along with Clive Bell and Lytton Strachey, as one of the founding members, present from the outset when the Thursday evenings first began at the home of the Stephen sisters – the future Vanessa Bell and Virginia Woolf.

He nevertheless remains something of an enigma, and to a certain extent, a presence in the margins. The first reason must certainly be his origins: he was born into a precariously middle-class Jewish family and brought up in Reform Judaism, which, by his teenage years, he had rejected. In the ambient antisemitism of early twentieth-century Britain – the almost instinctive, glib nature of which permeated even into the sceptical, rational, open-minded attitudes of his fellow ‘Bloomsberries’ – he could easily be marginalised with a pointed quip. In his youth, he learnt to block out such racial and social prejudice – with such success that he could later claim that it had had no influence on his life. Whatever the case, he proved a brilliant pupil at St Paul’s, and just as gifted as a scholarship-winning student at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he was soon to become the first ever Apostle of Jewish origin.

After graduating, less brilliantly than predicted, he entered the Colonial Civil Service and proved a successful colonial administrator in Ceylon, where he served for seven years. He resigned after proposing to Virginia Stephen and they were married in 1912. Thereafter, Leonard Woolf willingly relegated himself to the margins, as his wife’s career and well-being became the centre of his life, to a great extent, although he did have an extraordinarily successful, dynamic and productive literary career of his own. In this case, it would appear to be merely his own impressively assiduous, earnestly professional, committed working ethos which left him in the shadows when others opted for more visible, flamboyant public and professional paths.