The husband

The detail of Victoria Glendinning's eminently readable biography of Leonard Woolf gives the reader the measure of the man – accomplished, passionate, reserved, stoical. By Claire Messud

After meeting Leonard Woolf for the first time, the poet Rupert Brooke asked of him, “Was Woolf, who seems very nice, ever more than minor?” Brutal though this seems, it may reflect the consensus over time: he remains a figure best known for those to whom he was attached – his wife Virginia Woolf, of course, but also his close friends in the Bloomsbury set, including Lytton Strachey, John Maynard Keynes and Clive Bell. As Victoria Glendinning makes clear in her comprehensive and eminently readable biography, it is an assessment born of ignorance of his varied accomplishments and of the quiet complexity of his character, which was at once passionate, reserved and, above all, stoical. Considered chiefly in relation to his wife, he has been alternately hailed as the ideal feminist companion and nursemaid and excoriated as the controlling, repressive force that smothered her. Neither, and both, are probably somewhat true; but in so long and fulfilled a life (Leonard died at the age of 88, in 1969, outliving Virginia by 28 years), they are by no means the sum of the man.

Born in November 1880, Leonard was the third of nine siblings. The family was solidly bourgeois, Jewish but not religious and, even after his father's early death, when Leonard was just 11, managed to live in relative comfort. Leonard was educated at St Paul's School and Trinity College, Cambridge.Slight, austere in appearance, afflicted by a lifelong tremor, he was referred to by his future wife, when announcing their engagement, as “a penniless Jew”. He never dwelled upon the anti-semitism of the English culture of his times, but it set him as an outsider even among his intimates.Unlike many of his peers in Cambridge, the “penniless Jew” was forced to earn his living and to this end took a posting with the colonial civil service in Ceylon. From 1904 to 1911 he proved an effective and punctilious colonial administrator, whose faltering “faith in the imperial project” eventually prompted his resignation.

While in Ceylon, he lost his virginity to a prostitute and formed a number of romantic attachments, none serious. With Virginia, Leonard “fell terminally and unconditionally in love” with her “looks, her manner, her mind, the way she talked and moved”. Capable of great physical desire, he was forced to pursue a different sort of intimacy: Glendinning, like others before her, concludes that their marriage was never fully consummated.The union was, in its way, deeply fulfilling. Their letters reveal not only mutual dependence but great tenderness, concern and love. During each of Virginia's episodes of mental illness, Glendinning conveys the immense burden that fell upon Leonard. He tended his wife, the literary press they founded together, their garden and the household.What is most remarkable, perhaps, about their marriage, was its extraordinary productivity. Glendinning's biography has at times a whirlwind quality, in part because Leonard Woolf was simply doing so much: he and his wife founded and ran the Hogarth Press; he write stories and novels and books of political and cultural criticism; he was an editor at several journals, as well as a director of The New Statesman; and he was also directly involved in politics.

After Virginia's suicide, Leonard did not stop. Bolstered in his later years by a 25-year romantic alliance with a younger woman named Trekkie Parsons, he travelled, wrote his voluminous memoirs, spoke and gardened with undimmed energy until his death at 88. He handled his wife's legacy with unflagging commitment, answering all queries and requests. Leonard Woolf led an exemplary life, rich in spite of its adversities (in addition to Virginia, two of his siblings and a sister-in-law committed suicide, and another sister was mentally unstable). He was not glamorous or histrionic in the way of his wife, or of many of their circle. His life was, in some ways, willfully ordinary: even on the day of Virginia's disappearance he “entered in his diary the cumulative mileage of his car, plus the mileage for that day” and on the afternoon of her cremation, he went to have his hair cut. And yet, as Glendinning notes, the page of his diary on 28 March 1941 “is obscured by a brownish-yellow stain which has been rubbed or wiped. It could be tea or coffee or tears. The smudge is unique in all his years of neat diary-keeping.” In recording these small traces, Victoria Glendinning has given us the measure of the man.