Leonard Sidney Woolf (1880–1969) was an influential British political theorist, author, and publisher. In 1916, he joined the Fabian Society, and in 1917, along with his wife Virginia Woolf, he founded the Hogarth Press; the two became the center of the so-called “Bloomsbury Group.”
Born in London, he was educated at St Paul’s School and Trinity College-Cambridge, where he became part of the Bloomsbury Group, an influential circle of intellectuals and artists. Woolf’s early career included a seven-year stint in the Ceylon Civil Service (1904–11,) experiences from which he drew inspiration for his writing.
Upon returning to England, Woolf married writer Virginia Stephen in 1912. Together, they founded the Hogarth Press in 1917, which became a significant platform for modernist literature and published works by T.S. Eliot, E.M. Forster, and Sigmund Freud, among others.
Leonard Woolf’s notable works include The Village in the Jungle (1913,) a novel reflecting his experiences in Ceylon, and After the Deluge (1931,) a critical analysis of post-World War I political and social changes. He published his autobiography in five volumes: Sowing (1960,) Growing (1961,) Beginning Again (1964,) Downhill All the Way (1967,) and The Journey Not the Arrival Matters (1969.)
Woolf was also a committed political activist and a member of the Labour Party. His book International Government (1916) is considered an early influential work advocating for a global organization to maintain peace, prefiguring the League of Nations and the United Nations. Other notable works include Socialism and Co-operation (1921) and Principia Politica (1953.)
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There is nothing to which men cling more tenaciously than the privileges of class.
—Leonard Woolf
Topics: Class
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