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Leonard Sidney Woolf – ) was a British political theorist, author, publisher, and civil servant. He was married to author Virginia Woolf. As a member of the Labour Party and the Fabian Society, Woolf was an avid publisher of his own work and his wife's novels. A writer himself, Woolf created nineteen individual works and wrote six autobiographies. Leonard and Virginia did not have any children.
In October 1904, Woolf moved to Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) to become a cadet in the Ceylon Civil Service, in Jaffna and later Kandy, and by August 1908 was named an assistant government agent in the Southern Province, where he administered the District of Hambantota. Woolf returned to England in May 1911 for a year's leave. Instead, however, he resigned in early 1912 and that same year married Virginia Woolf.
Leonard and Virginia Woolf lived at 17 The Green, Richmond upon Thames, starting from October 1914. In early March 1915, the couple moved to nearby Hogarth House, Paradise Road.
In 1919, the Woolfs purchased the Round House in Pipe Passage, Lewes, East Sussex. The same year, they discovered Monk's House in nearby Rodmell, which both she and Leonard favoured because of its orchard and garden. She then bought Monk's House and sold the Round House.
Together, Leonard and Virginia Woolf became influential in the Bloomsbury Group, which also included various other former Apostles.
In December 1917, Woolf became one of the co-founders of the 1917 Club, which met in Gerrard Street, Soho.
On the introduction of conscription in 1916, during the First World War, Woolf was rejected for military service on medical grounds and turned to politics and sociology. He joined the Labour Party and the Fabian Society, and became a regular contributor to the New Statesman. In 1916, he wrote International Government, proposing an international agency to enforce world peace. He stood as the Labour candidate for the Combined English Universities in 1922.
As his wife's mental health worsened, Woolf devoted much of his time to caring for her (he himself suffered from depression). In 1917, the Woolfs bought a small hand-operated printing press and with it, they founded the Hogarth Press. Their first project was a pamphlet, hand-printed and bound by themselves. Within ten years the Press had become a full-scale publishing house, issuing Virginia's novels, Leonard's tracts and, among other works, the first edition of T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land. Woolf continued as the main director of the Press until his death. His wife suffered from severe bouts of mental illness throughout her life, until her suicide by drowning in 1941. Later, Leonard fell in love with a married artist, Trekkie Parsons.
In 1919, Woolf became editor of the International Review. He also edited the international section of the Contemporary Review from 1920 to 1922. He was literary editor of The Nation and Athenaeum (generally referred to simply as The Nation) from 1923 to 1930, and joint founder and editor of The Political Quarterly from 1931 to 1959, and for a time he served as secretary of the Labour Party's advisory committees on international and colonial questions.
In 1960, Woolf revisited Ceylon and was surprised at the warmth of the welcome he received, and even the fact that he was still remembered. Woolf accepted an honorary doctorate from the then-new University of Sussex in 1964 and in 1965 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He declined the offer of Companion of Honour (CH) in the Queen's Birthday Honours list in 1966.
His papers are held by the University of Sussex at the Falmer campus.
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