Intoxicated by ideas and by their contact with Moore, they read, wrote and talked of art, ethics, politics and religion, of Plato, Milton, Shakespeare, Henry James and Flaubert. When they drank too much, they weren't sick in the shrubbery, but marched through Trinity Great Court reciting Swinburne too loudly.
When he went to Ceylon in 1904, he and Lytton corresponded daily, sometimes twice a day. Over the 11 years he was on the island, Woolf lost his virginity to a prostitute, prosecuted his Colonial Service job with fairness and tried his best to understand the people he was governing. In February 1909, Lytton proposed to Virginia Stephen and for an agonizing moment thought she'd accepted. With relief he wrote to Woolf that it would really be much better if he himself were to marry her, as he'd “have the immense advantage of physical desire.” It was another three-and-a-half years before the match was accomplished and the marriage will be the chief reason this book will have most of its readers.
There was, however, a great deal more to Leonard Woolf than being Virginia's consort and nurse. An entire political biography of Leonard was written by Duncan Wilson, but Glendinning gives an account of his dealings with the Webbs, the Fabian Society, the New Statesman and the Labour party that is as full and fair as the general reader will want. Ditto his career as a publisher and writer of both political tracts and reports and of fiction (though his biographer is herself a considerably better novelist than her subject). She (I think, rightly) sees that women played a hugely important part on Woolf's life and details the epistolary courtships to which he was prone, as well as his actual, long-lasting love affair with Trekkie Parsons, the artist wife of Ian Parsons, the publisher who bought Leonard's Hogarth Press for Chatto & Windus.
In a chapter called “Aftermath” Glendinning goes into the dispersal of Virginia's manuscripts and letters by the late Misses Hamill and Barker, the two old American ladies who looted them, along with so many other Bloomsbury papers, often paying in cash and disappearing back to Chicago with suitcases full of Britain's literary heritage. Though the author has hidden some of her tracks by failing to give page numbers when citing books, her deft writing and striking sympathy for her subject make this a landmark biography.
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