The man in the shadow of Virginia Woolf

"Leonard Woolf: A Biography"

by Victoria Glendinning

Free Press, 498 pp., $30

Standing in his wife's angular shadow in blurry Bloomsbury photographs, Leonard Woolf has long been an enigmatic figure. A writer, journalist, editor, antiwar crusader and foreign-service veteran, he's far better known as the husband of the novelist Virginia Woolf, and even in that role he's ambiguous.

In the vast library of books written about Virginia, some praise him as a saintly helpmate, while others vilify him as a primary cause of her much-discussed madness. These books always end with Virginia's death, leaving Leonard as a seemingly unfinished story.

"Leonard Woolf: A Biography," a meticulously researched and delightfully readable work by the literary biographer Victoria Glendinning ("Vita: The Life of Vita Sackville-West," "Anthony Trollope"), lets him stand alone. While other books have focused on his political theories, and his own five-volume autobiography exhaustively documents his life, this is the first outside look at the whole man. The much-documented but perpetually elusive Virginia takes hold of the book in some passages, as well she might, but nonetheless Leonard emerges: complicated, somewhat eccentric, sometimes misguided — but a deeply intelligent and fundamentally decent man.

One of nine children in a well-off London Jewish family, Leonard lost his affectionate father at age 12 (an experience mirroring that of his wife-to-be, motherless at 13). As a child, he would write later, he developed what he called his "carapace" — a hard shell, to shield him from the "outside and usually hostile world." At Trinity College, Cambridge, he met the friends who would become central to his adult life: Lytton Strachey, Clive Bell, Saxon Sydney-Turner and Thoby Stephen, whose lovely sisters Vanessa and Virginia occasionally visited him at college.

After graduation, he spent seven years in Ceylon as a Colonial Service administrator, bringing along 70 volumes of Voltaire and a fox terrier named Charles. Though he would forever remember those years (and would draw upon them for his novel "The Village in the Jungle"), he declined a career in civil service, returning to London to marry Virginia in 1912 and embarking upon a quiet, literary life.

The couple founded the Hogarth Press in 1917, publishing their own works and those of their contemporaries; Leonard would also serve as longtime editor of The Nation and a frequent contributor to other political journals, often writing on the topic of war and its prevention. He was, writes Glendinning, "a propagandist, a polemicist, a campaigner and an ideas man. He was a public intellectual but not an academic."

Glendinning's treatment of the Woolfs' famous marriage is thoughtful and relatively brief; this ground, as she frequently notes, is well-trodden. From it emerges a portrait of mutual need, of illness and care (Virginia, through her life, suffered from mental breakdowns), of childlike dependence and mature love. The strict regimen that Leonard created for her gave her the security, Glendinning writes, to take risks with herself and her writing.

It was an intricately co-dependent relationship: Leonard adored Virginia, Virginia needed Leonard (and loved him "insofar as it was in her"), Leonard grew to need her need of him. Her 1941 suicide note, ending "I don't think any two people could have been happier than we have been," is well known; just as touching, and less public, was Leonard's diary note, on a scrap of paper, days after her death. "I know that she is drowned and yet I listen for her to come in at the door. I know that it is the last page, and yet I turn it over," he wrote.

Leonard's life, though, did go on; he died at 88 after spending much of the last third of his life in a happy, albeit unorthodox relationship with a married woman, Trekkie Parsons. After Leonard's funeral, his nephew Quentin Bell wrote to Parsons of the family's gratitude for "taking Leonard out of that appalling misery [after Virginia's death] and into a long and lovely autumn." "Leonard Woolf: A Biography" leaves the reader with the satisfying sense of a long life well-lived; and of a man emerging from the shadows into his own light.

Moira Macdonald is the movie critic

for The Seattle Times.