Sir Leslie Stephen

Says Sir Leslie Stephen in his life of Swift: 'His doctrine was that virtue is the one thing which deserves love and admiration, and yet that virtue in this hideous chaos of a world involves misery and decay.' Of his extreme arrogance and brutality to those who offended him there are numerous anecdotes; not least in the case of women, whom he, like most men of his age, regarded as man's inferiors.

Among the core members was Vanessa Bell who, in her mid 20s and following the deaths of her illustrious parents Sir Leslie Stephen and Julia Prinsep Duckworth, sold their house in Westminster and bought her next home in Gordon Square, Woolwich, taking her siblings Virginia and brothers Thoby and Adrian with her.

In the book History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century, celebrated literary scholar Sir Leslie Stephen depicted Ferguson as nothing more than "a facile and dexterous declaimer" (p.

Her father, Sir Leslie Stephen, a founding editor of the Dictionary of National Biography, died and she became mentally ill and attempted suicide.

This tenth anniversary Paris Press edition includes for the first time a pairing with Woolf's mother, Julia Stephen, who was not a writer but a lover of writing and certainly at home in the literary world with her husband, the eminent critic and biographer Sir Leslie Stephen. Julia was a famous beauty whose spotlight came with her arduous attention to caring for the sick and afflicted, and the poor and vagrant, and who became famous for her endless visits to charity hospitals.

"Impressions of Sir Leslie Stephen." The Essays of Virginia Woolf 1904-1912.

Sir Leslie Stephen (author, critic and the father of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell) once famously dismissed the historical novel as 'Pure cram or pure fiction' The worst historical novels are weighed down by facts and stifled by the need to ensure that the characters conform to the dictates of Malthus, Marx or (post)-Modernism.