A Biography: Leonard Woolf

A Biography: Leonard Woolf Victoria Glendinning. Leonard Woolf: A Biography. New York: Free Press; Simon & Schuster, 2006. 498 pp. $30.00

THE MAIN ACCOMPLISHMENTS of this biography, and they are important, are making Leonard Woolf matter by conjuring up a distinctive human being and placing him in a dense network of persons, places, events, ideas, and making the reader want to return to his varied and always interesting writing, not least his marvelous autobiographies. Glendinning has a deep affection for and yet necessary distance from her subject and a deep familiarity with the milieu (she has also written a biography of Vita Sackville-West). As a book for the Bloomsbury curious and to a certain degree for the Virginia Woolf scholar who would benefit from seeing her life embedded so deeply in Leonard's, it succeeds very well. For the Leonard Woolf scholar, however, who already knows many of the materials drawn upon here, although s/ he may not have gone through as many of the boxes and papers in the Sussex archives and elsewhere as Glendinning has, the verdict is more mixed.

It is not simply a question of being ready to pounce upon an error here, an omission there, but a sense that too many fragments have been stitched together to support a construct that may be more the biographer's than the subject she is writing about. A small example: there are pages cut out of Trekkie Parsons's diary for 11 and 12 April 1958 (the relationship between Leonard and Trekkie lasted from the early 1940s until Leonard's death in 1969). It suits Glendinning's narrative to suggest that it was Norah Smallwood's relationship with Ian Parsons that was the reason for the excision. But no evidence is offered-even the date those pages were removed, information that would have, had she checked it out, not supported that cause and effect. Too much here and elsewhere depends on "private information." Overall the notes are...