The Life and Letters of Leslie Stephen

by Frederic William Maitland

Leslie Stephen was the first serious critic of the novel, and he was also editor of the great Dictionary of National Biography from its beginning in 1882 until 1891. In 1859 he was ordained a minister. As a tutor at Cambridge his philosophical readings led him to skepticism, and later he relinquished his holy orders. He wrote several essays defending his agnostic position. Throughout his life Stephen was a prominent athlete and mountaineer. Virginia Woolf was the younger of his two daughters by his second wife. His first wife was Harriet Marian Thackeray, daughter of the novelist. This book is notable for containing the first book appearance of Virginia Woolf (a brief memoir of her father on pages 474-476).

532 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1906

About the author

Frederic William Maitland, FBA was an English historian and lawyer who is generally regarded as the modern father of English legal history.

Reviews

[Scott · Rating 3 out of 5]

The edition I read was the original, published in 1906; I saw it at an antiques show and, knowing who Stephen was, I grabbed it. Apparently I was the first person to read it all the way through, as some pages in quires needed cutting to see what continued on from the page I had just read.
Stephen was the father of Virginia and Vanessa who became well known as a writer and artist. Stephen had an interesting life: journalist; critic; un-collared cleric; and editor of the Dictionary of National Biography. Stephen was also a keen mountaineer in the last decade of the nineteenth century. Naturally, he was an inveterate letter writer, as, well, everyone had to be. Not much about his kids, though brother Thoby is mentioned several times. It was the letters which caused me to take so long to read the book: I pursued distractions in the form of narrative history and science fiction. My biggest mistake was looking up one thing, one thing in the Oxford Companion to Ships and the Sea, and I was deep in for hours over several days. But I always returned to this memoir of Stephen, written by a close friend.