Summer Courses 2025
Further information about the talks in our Summer Courses
Virginia Woolf: Writing Life, July 2025
Live online summer course 10-14 July 2025
Summer course in Cambridge 20-25 July 2025
Claire Davison on Leslie Stephen, Life-Writer, Life Force
According to Virginia Woolf, her father Leslie Stephen had a ‘strong’, ‘healthy out of door, moor striding mind’. She underlines his ‘simplicity’, ‘integrity’ and ‘eccentricity’, his intellectual generosity, and his harshly critical yet creative and even playful personality, and most memorably sums him up as ‘after all these years, unforgettable’. Whether we read Woolf’s accounts of Stephen, tributes from his contemporaries or in-depth biographical studies, it is hard not to be impressed and intrigued by this perplexing, intense and influential man who was both a free-thinking, pioneering spirit and a most eminent Victorian. A driving force at home and in the workplace, Stephen was also a prolific biographer and one of the founding editors of the Dictionary of National Biography – a monument of erudition which remains a vital source of knowledge today.
After a brief overview of Stephen’s life and career, this talk focuses on Stephen’s impressive expeditions as an Alpinist and the accounts he later made of them. It also looks at how these exploits were evoked by writers seeking to tell his life story.
No prior reading is necessary, but you might wish to read some of these sources before or after the talk.
• Thomas Hardy, ‘The Schreckhorn, With Thoughts of Leslie Stphen’ (1897).
• Alex Siskin, ‘Leslie Stephen, Mountaineer’, Paris Review (26 Nov. 2012).
• Leslie Stephen, ‘Biography,’ The National Review (October 1893).
• Leslie Stephen, The Playground of Europe, London: Duckworth, 1871. Chapter on Mont Blanc as PDF.
• Victorian Web on Leslie Stephen.
• Virginia Woolf, ‘Impressions of Leslie Stephen’ (1906) in The Essays of Virginia Woolf, vol. 1, ed. Andrew McNeillie, vol. 1, pp. 127-30.
• Virginia Woolf, ‘Leslie Stephen, the Philosopher at Home: A Daughter’s Memories’ (1932), in The Essays of Virginia Woolf, vol. 5, ed. Stuart N. Clarke, pp. 585-93; also in Woolf, Selected Essays, ed. David Bradshaw, Oxford World’s Classics, 2008.
• Virginia Woolf, ‘A Sketch of the Past’ in Moments of Being, 2nd ed, ed. Jeanne Schulkind, New York: Harcourt, 1985.
Marielle O’Neill on Leonard Woolf: Reflections on a Political Life
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. In later life, he wrote a 5-volume Autobiography, published 1960-69. This work is a fascinating reflection upon political thinking and political activism in the early twentieth century.
Marielle will explore Leonard Woolf’s descriptions in the Autobiography of his political career and the influential people he met. She will discuss how he developed his anti-imperialist ideas in his life and writing. And she will consider how Leonard Woolf uses his life writings to weigh up his political ideals against the realities of political contingency and compromise.
No pre-reading is necessary for this talk, but you may want to read some of Leonard Woolf’s Autobiography, especially on the years 1919 to 1939. This is currently out of print, but it is available on Internet Archive (free, but login required).
