Leonard Woolf

Origins and early life

Leonard Woolf was born in Kensington on 25 November 1880, the third of ten children of Sidney Woolf, a Jewish barrister and Queen's Counsel, and Marie de Jongh, of a Dutch Jewish family; he was born and raised a Jew, and although he became an unbeliever he never disguised his origin and wrote about the antisemitism he met at school, at Cambridge and among his wife's family with a clarity that is still bracing.

Work and career

His father's early death left the family poor, and he won scholarships to St Paul's and to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he was elected to the Apostles alongside Lytton Strachey, John Maynard Keynes and G. E. Moore. From 1904 to 1911 he served in the Ceylon Civil Service, ending as an assistant government agent in charge of a district of 100,000 people, and came home convinced that imperial rule was indefensible; his novel The Village in the Jungle (1913) is written from inside the Sinhalese village rather than from the veranda, which almost nothing in English colonial fiction had done.

He married Virginia Stephen in 1912 and cared for her through her illnesses until her death in 1941. Commissioned by the Fabian Society, he wrote International Government in 1916, a detailed proposal for a supranational authority to prevent war, and it was used directly by the British government in drafting the covenant of the League of Nations; Empire and Commerce in Africa (1920) followed, one of the first economic analyses of colonialism.

In 1917 he and Virginia bought a hand press and founded the Hogarth Press, which published Katherine Mansfield, T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, the first English translations of Freud and the whole of Virginia Woolf. He edited political journals, advised the Labour party for decades, and lived on at Monk's House until 14 August 1969.