cover image Letters of Leonard Woolf

Letters of Leonard Woolf

Leonard Woolf. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt P, $29.95 (616pp) ISBN 978-0-15-150915-7

Although remembered mainly only as Virginia Woolf's husband, Leonard Woolf (1880-1969) distinguished himself in many fields. He was a precocious (and anti-imperalist) colonial administrator; an influential publisher (most notably of T. S. Eliot and Freud); a political adviser to the Labour Party; and the author of novels, books on political philosophy, essays and a striking autobiography. He was also, as these 600 selected letters attest, a man who preferred the typewriter to the telephone. Arranged thematically and efficiently introduced, the letters cover in lively fashion the major phases of Woolf's life, his wife's bouts of madness included, revealing an attractive personality and a tough-minded exponent of the cultural ideal associated with ``Bloomsbury'' and the Cambridge of humanist philosopher G. E. Moore. The correspondents include E. M. Forster, Eliot, H. G. Wells and Sylvia Townsend Warner. Spotts ( The Churches and Politics of Germany ) is to be commended for a job well done. Illustrations. (Oct.)