Leonard Woolf (Leonard Sidney Woolf) Biography

British author and publisher, born in Kensington, educated at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he formed lasting friendship with Lytton Strachey, J. M. Keynes, and others with whom he was later eminent in the Bloomsbury Group. He held postings in Ceylon with the Colonial Service from 1904 to 1912, when, already out of sympathy with colonialism, he resigned in order to marry Virginia Stephen (see Woolf, Virginia), with whom he began the Hogarth Press in 1917. Ceylon supplies the settings for his fiction, which consists of two novels, The Village and the Jungle (1913) and The Wise Virgins (1914), and the shorter pieces of Stories of the East (1916). His subsequent career as a writer was dominated by his social and political beliefs. Among his many publications on domestic and international issues were Socialism and Co-operation (1920), Imperialism and Civilization (1928), and The War for Peace (1940); After the Deluge (2 volumes, 1931, 1939) and Principia Politica (1953) form detailed expositions of his interpretation of socialism. He was editor of Political Quarterly from 1931 to 1959. Notable among his other works is the highly regarded autobiography made up of Sowing (1960), Growing (1961), Beginning Again (1964), Downhill all the Way (1967), and The Journey not the Arrival Matters (1969); the five books were later published as An Autobiography (2 volumes, 1980). Frederic Spotts edited Letters of Leonard Woolf (1990). Leonard Woolf: A Political Biography by Duncan Wilson appeared in 1979.