Leonard Woolf

Known for being a figure in the shadows, even the “black star”, as the expression of the time had it, Leonard Woolf (1880–1969) was also, and above all, the founder of the highly respected publishing house The Hogarth Press. A member of the Bloomsbury Group, writer and political theorist, Woolf studied at the University of Cambridge, where he became acquainted with Lytton Strachey, John Maynard Keynes, Clive Bell, and Virginia Stephen, who would become his wife and lifelong confidante. As Victoria Glendinning, Leonard’s biographer, writes, the young man was immediately captivated by Virginia, loving everything about her, from “her manners” to “her mind” to “the way she spoke and moved.”

And yet, Leonard and Virginia’s lives cannot be understood as mere superimposed templates. Virginia took her own life in 1941; Leonard lived on for nearly three more decades. In an article titled Leonard Woolf’s Quiet Complexity written for The New Yorker, journalist Claire Messud describes the stoicism Woolf displayed. Fond of the expression “nothing matters” since his Cambridge days, a kind of protective talisman against life’s unpredictability, Messud writes:

“His life was, in some ways, wilfully ordinary: even on the day of Virginia’s disappearance, he entered in his diary the cumulative mileage of his car, plus the mileage for that day, and on the afternoon of her cremation, he went to have his hair cut.”

Yet this stoicism was by no means a sign of indifference. In contrast to figures vilified by feminists, such as Ted Hughes, husband of poet Sylvia Plath, Woolf continues to be widely respected in literary and activist circles. Virginia herself affirmed this in her final letter to Leonard: “If anybody could have saved me, it would have been you. Everything has gone from me but the certainty of your goodness.”

Quack Quack in politics (1935)

Though he was a devoted husband, Leonard was also a committed journalist. A strong supporter of the League of Nations, democratic socialism, and closely associated with the Fabian Society, he did not hesitate to speak out against the rise of fascism in his 1935 essay Quack Quack in Politics. Drawing parallels between official propaganda photographs of Mussolini and effigies of Polynesian tribal chiefs, Woolf reimagined political language through the image (much like Virginia had done in her pacifist essay Three Guineas). The statuette, carefully selected by Leonard, did not merely resemble Mussolini in an unsettling way; it served as a magnifying mirror, revealing the grotesque, primitive, almost pagan nature of the cult of the leader. In this way, Woolf sought to reverse the Western gaze, demonstrating that belief and irrationality were not the preserve of colonised peoples, but also lay at the very heart of fascism. Woolf thus exposed the totemic mechanisms of Mussolini’s power, stripping them of their aura. When compared to an inanimate idol, the Duce’s authority appeared fragile. Drained of its content and substance, it rests on nothing but “tiny feet of clay.”

The Poet's eye (1926) by Vernon Lee , published by Leonard & Virginia Woolf at The Hogarth Press

Though Woolf wielded political irony with precision, he remained above all a discreet, (though pivotal) craftsman of English literary life. In 1926, he oversaw the publication of a short essay by Vernon Lee entitled The Poet’s Eye, a reference to a line from A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1595) by Shakespeare. Drawing on Wordsworth, Keats, and the song of the nightingale, Lee reflects on her inability to write in verse, and then outlines a distinction between verse and prose, returning to what it means, exactly, to be a poet: not so much a matter of unique sensitivity as of the handling of a singular form. If, for Shakespeare, the poet gives shape to the “airy nothing” by naming it, then Leonard Woolf, since he summons, collects, and enables as an editor, participates in that same invocatory gesture. A gesture that symbolises a voice likewise suspended, and an amulet that, like Leonard, turns out to be a black star: “nothing matters and everything matters.”

Alan B.