Leonard Woolf

Born in London in 1880, Leonard Woolf was a writer, editor and journalist, active in the Labour Party and Fabian Society, with a strong commitment to peace and social justice. He supported independence for India and (then) Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) in the 1920s.

He studied at Trinity College, Cambridge. He and Virginia Stephen married in 1912. His 5-volume autobiography is a gripping account of British intellectual life and politics in the first half of the twentieth century. Leonard Woolf was a very perceptive observer of politics and history of the first half of the twentieth century. Many of his political observations remain pertinent today.

Leonard Woolf died in 1969 at Monk’s House.

Selected works by Leonard Woolf

International Government (1916)
The Future of Constantinople (1917)
Co-operation and the Future of Industry (1918)
Empire and Commerce in Africa: A Study in Economic Imperialism (1919)
Socialism and Co-operation (1921)
Fear and Politics: A Debate at the Zoo (1925)
Imperialism and Civilization (1928)
After the Deluge: A Study of Communal Psychology, 2 vols. (1931-39)
Leonard Woolf, ed., The Intelligent Man's War to Prevent War (1933)
The War for Peace (1940)

Autobiography

Sowing: An Autobiography of the Years 1880-1904 (1960)
Growing: An Autobiography of the Years 1904-1911 (1961)
Beginning Again: An Autobiography of the Years 1911-1918 (1964)
Downhill All the Way: An Autobiography of the Years 1919-1939 (1967)
The Journey not the Arrival Matters: An Autobiography of the Years 1939-1969 (1969)

Links

On Leonard Woolf’s life, Open University website.
On Leonard Woolf’s writing, British Library website.
On the Hogarth Press, British Library website.
BBC, Great Lives radio programme on Leonard Woolf, 2004.
Charleston website on Leonard Woolf.
Literature Cambridge Podcast on Leonard Woolf, October 2023.

Further Reading

Lucian Ashworth, International Relations and the Labour Party: Intellectuals and Policymaking from 1918 to 1945 (Tauris Academic Studies, 2007)

Victoria Glendenning, Leonard Woolf: A Biography (Simon and Schuster, 2006)

Fred Leventhal and Peter Stansky, Leonard Woolf: Bloomsbury Socialist (Oxford University Press, 2019)

Mark Mazower, Governing the World: The History of an Idea (Penguin, 2012)

Luke Reader, ‘An Alternative to Imperialism: Leonard Woolf, The Labour Party and Imperial Internationalism, 1915–1922’, The International History Review, 41 (2019), 157-77

Luke Reader, ‘A Jew of a Rather Peculiar Sort: Leonard Woolf, Jewishness, and a Public 20th Century Life’, Jewish Culture and History, 19 (2018), 237-55

Helen Southworth, Leonard and Virginia Woolf: The Hogarth Press and the Networks of Modernism (Edinburgh University Press, 2010)

Rhiannon Vickers, The Labour Party and the World: The Evolution of Labour's Foreign Policy, 1900–1951 (Manchester University Press, 2003)

Peter Wilson, The International Theory of Leonard Woolf: A Study in Twentieth Century Idealism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2003)

Peter Wilson, ‘Leonard Woolf, the League of Nations, and Peace Between the Wars’, Political Quarterly, 84 (2015)