Biography: In July 1930 Harold Nicolson went to dinner with Leonard and Virginia Woolf and subsequently noted in his diary that the subject of broadening selection to the British foreign office had come up in conversation: "The awkward question of the Jews arises. I admit this is a snag. Jews are far more interested in international life than Englishmen and if we opened up the service it might be flooded by clever Jews. It was a little difficult to argue this point with Leonard there."
A little awkward because Woolf was Jewish and the business of his racial origins runs like a leitmotif through this new biography. One reason why such should be the case is that although late in his life Leonard Woolf wrote "I have always been conscious of being a Jew", he insisted it was in much the same way as "a Catholic is conscious of being a Catholic in England". Yet whatever about earlier times, by the 20th century English Catholics were not subjected to the kind of casual abuse Jews still suffered, even from the most liberal-minded Gentiles. Virginia Woolf herself cannot be held immune to accusations of anti-Semitism, as when prior to their marriage she wrote to Leonard of her concerns: "Possibly your being a Jew comes in at this point. You seem so foreign."
Except Leonard Woolf perceived himself as being in no way foreign. He was an Englishman and argued that anti-Semitism of any kind "has not touched me personally and only very peripherally", as though what took place across all parts of Europe infected by the Nazi regime was of no relevance to him. It is one of the stranger aspects of this strange, good man's character, although there were plenty of others, such as his ability to embrace the tenets of socialism and yet regard members of the Woolf household staff with lofty condescension, writing of a parlourmaid that "Lily was one of the persons for whom I feel the same kind of affection as I do for cats and dogs".
In other words, despite his acute powers of observation, he often chose to see only what suited him. The explanation probably lies with Woolf's development, while still a schoolboy, of what he described as his "carapace"; a tough outer surface that repulsed anything not fitting in with his vision of the world. The carapace certainly helped him to survive almost 30 years of marriage to Virginia Stephen, a woman of rare intellectual ability possessing severe psychological problems but also a thick knot of selfishness in her make-up. Leonard Woolf was immensely tolerant, loving and supportive. However, it's open to question whether the support he offered his wife was necessarily best either for her or for him. According to Victoria Glendinning, he believed Virginia Woolf's "mental and nervous disturbances were functionally linked to her genius". Therefore, "to tamper with that link could be disastrous for her and for her writing".
HE DID NOT tamper. Instead, he allowed his wife to determine the course of their marriage, including its lack of full sexual consummation. Woolf's premarital involvement with prostitutes while he was a colonial administrator in Ceylon suggests the sexual impulse inside him was strong and yet he was willing to suppress this for the sake of Virginia and her health. Had he not been so hostile to Freudian dogma, he might have accepted that he sublimated his physical desires into work. Despite a relatively frail constitution and intermittent bouts of illness, he was an exceptionally busy man, producing vast tranches of material on such subjects as Empire and Commerce in Africa and The Framework of a Lasting Peace. He wrote two novels, several short stories, five volumes of autobiography, innumerable reviews and essays. He acted as literary editor or editor of various publications, sat on boards, gave speeches and co-founded the Hogarth Press, which would publish not just his and Virginia's work but that of TS Eliot, Katherine Mansfield, Robert Graves, Cecil Day-Lewis, William Plomer and Laurie Lee, among many others. He also assumed all responsibility for the Woolfs' domestic arrangements, minutely recording every item of expenditure in a succession of notebooks.
IT WAS THE full and honourable life of a decent man and yet it feels somehow inevitable he will remain primarily remembered as the husband of Virginia. Even before his death, the Bloomsbury industry was in full swing and Leonard Woolf had already been assigned his own small place in English cultural history. No book could alter the spot he then received, but this one deserves the highest praise for telling his story with so much vim and flair.
Victoria Glendinning is that rarity among biographers: an admirable stylist. As when she says letters sent to Leonard Woolf by his brother Edgar in adulthood "were like lumps of masonry hurled from an adjacent building". Or when in a footnote she advises anyone studying literary reputations in the last century "to check out personal links between canonical authors and those reviewers who piled the first bright pebbles on the cairn of celebrity". Not that Glendinning needs further pebbles, but it seems the cue for this review to draw to a close.
Robert O'Byrne is a writer and journalist
Leonard Woolf: A Life By Victoria Glendinning Simon & Schuster, 530pp. £25