Leonard Woolf: A Life

With her new biography of Leonard Woolf, Victoria Glendinning moves him out of the shadow of his celebrated wife. An innovative civil administrator in Ceylon, a leading light of the Fabian society, a writer and the founder, with Virginia Woolf, of the pioneering Hogarth Press, Leonard emerges as a formidable figure in his own right. In this extract from the first chapter, Glendinning introduces us to him

Sat 16 Sep 2006 00.09 BST

Virginia and Leonard Woolf

In the Beginning

Having a child is problematic, wrote Leonard Woolf when in his eighties, and childless. It concerns the "new human being" as much as its parents, since this new human being is born without having given its consent. One should think twice, "from the point of view of the hypothetical child". He himself was born, without his consent, on 25 November 1880. There he is, Leonard Sidney Woolf, in the Census returns for 1881, a five-month-old baby. 

Everyone, holding a baby, has to wonder what life holds in store for him. No one could have foreseen what would happen to this one. He grew up to become a core member of a group of intimate and talented friends who continue to inspire interest and analysis a century later. In his early twenties, as a colonial servant, he administered ten thousand square miles of village and jungle. He became an anti-imperialist, a Marxist "of a sort" and a socialist, and was an éminence grise of the early Labour Party in Britain as it became a party of government. His adult life spanned the two world wars; his writings informed the charter of the League of Nations and, as polemical journalist, as editor and author, his lifelong mission was to prevent the barbarism and insanity of future war through international cooperation and collective security. 

His anguished intelligence saw all too clearly both the failure of this great project, and what he saw as the failure of the Left in Britain. He had his own demons to fight in public and in private life, being a man of extremes and contradictions: ferocious and tender, violent and self-restrained, opinionated and non-judgmental. Belief in reason pulled him one way, irrational passion another. He was disconcerting, inner-directed, attractive, always an outsider. The constants in his character were honesty, persistence and energy. He played all games, competitively. He was a dedicated gardener. He had an affinity with animals. Non-stop work - at his writing, at his political activities, in the garden - came naturally to him. 

He liked women, and women liked him. ("I have always been greatly attracted to the undiluted female mind, as well as to the female body.") With his wife, he founded the Hogarth Press. He had no idea when he married Virginia Stephen how her mental instability would determine and distort his own trajectory, nor that she would become one of the most famous English authors of the twentieth century. He knew how to love, and she was the love of his life. After her suicide came change and a new attachment. In his last decade, five volumes of autobiography won him respect and recognition. He left not only distinguished books on international relations, but also satirical squibs, a great mass of literary and political journalism, a play, poetry, short stories, and two novels. 

Eclipsed in the literary canon, and in the public imagination, by the illustriousness of Virginia Woolf - his family name, when standing alone, commonly signifying her, not him - he is a dark star. "You cannot escape Fate," he wrote at the end of his life, "and Fate, I have always felt, is not in the future, but in the past."

· Leonard Woolf: A Life is published by Simon & Schuster

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