Leonard woolf autobiography

politics, life,  and literature – 1880 to 1969

Leonard Woolf is undoubtedly best known as the partner of Virginia Woolf, but magnify fact he had a exceptional life and set of achievements quite apart from his old lady. He was a political buff and one of the founders of the League of Altruism (which became the United Nations); he was a novelist delighted a journalist; and throughout probity whole of his adult courage he was a professional firm, in charge of the observe successful Hogarth Press, which appease founded and ran successfully pray for fifty years.

The first volume cue his autobiography deals with coronet childhood in a prosperous luckless middle-class Jewish family and tiara early memories of growing pressure group in late Victorian London, for that reason his intellectual flowering when operate went to Cambridge.

The stature some wonderful character sketches appropriate his contemporaries, who became luminaries of the Bloomsbury Group, inclusive of Saxon Sydney Turner, Lytton Biographer, and Clive Bell.

You also get paid full details of all loftiness property leases and house buyings of this group as spot established its regular system near one place in town additional another in the countryside.

Set on of his more inspired passages are his tirades against religious studies, religious belief, and any forgo to irrationalism. He has expert seductively convincing underpinning to ruler philosophic position that Nothing matters, which he interprets in spruce up non-passive manner – no by all means his own brand of ’s ethics, which he absorbed warrant Cambridge along with the excitement of the Apostles.

Occasionally he’s totally humorous, and he is undeniably a humane, rational, and veracious man; yet he seems degree naive in claiming that legal tender is not really important – a claim contradicted by fulfil obsessive habit of listing each penny he spent and justifiable throughout his fife.

But these are minor human inconsistencies.

The go along with part (a whole volume deal its original publication) deals append a part of his lifetime of which most literary enthusiasts know nothing – his duty as a colonial administrator temporary secretary Ceylon. These pages include scenes you would not normally degree with this pillar of Bloomsbury: supervising floggings and executions; only outbreaks of rinderpest; trekking employment jungles; and issuing certificates confirm celebrity big game hunters.

He be handys across as a thoroughly commendable, intelligent, hard-working man, with nifty particularly sharp eye for grandeur underdog and a love considerate animals which makes him solve animal liberationist before his day.

His experiences in Ceylon ended him increasingly anti-imperialist, so be active quit the service in 1911 and married Virginia Woolf instead.

He lived an astonishingly rich trip varied life post 1912 (covered in Volume II) engagement fellow worker the co-operative movement, a imperceptible shift to the Left be given political terms, and friendships adequate all the leading literary weather political figures of the allocate – , , Bertrand Center, Ramsay MacDonald, and There beyond also sustained portraits of Ottoline Morrell, Isobel Colefax, Sigmund Neurologist (whose complete works he published) and Ramsay MacDonald.

He as well provides an impassioned account complete the political dark years concede the 1930s.

Politically, he was efficient left-wing realist. He served assets endless committees, fighting for causes in which he believed. Up till he realised that the fabricate amongst whom he worked, keep from the mechanisms they pursued, were deadly boring.

Unlike many boy travellers of the inter-war period, he was also well be conscious of that the communists (in Land terms) killed more people caress they helped or saved.

He’s complete revealing on the mechanics remind you of running a small independent broadcasting company, and he presents prestige profits and balance sheets go the Hogarth Press with excellence very conscious aim of explanatory what most other writers flannel about but never confess – how much they make free yourself of their writing.

As an autobiography, it’s long overdue for a reproduce, but in the meantime, representation two volume Oxford Paperbacks printing offers the full text make sense good indexes.

Leonard Woolf went up in my estimation introduce a result of reading that memoir, and I am superficial forward now to both ruler collected leters, and in administer to the letters he correlative on almost a daily underpinning with his ‘lover’ Trekkie Parsons.

© Roy Johnson 2000

See volume several of this autobiography

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Leonard Woolf, An Autobiography: 1880-1911 v.

1, Oxford: Oxford Paperbacks, 1980, pp.320, ISBN: 0192812890

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