Early Life
Woolf was born in London, the third of ten children of Solomon Rees Sydney, a Jewish barrister and Queen's Counsel and Marie (née de Jongh). After his father died in 1892, Woolf was sent to board at Arlington House School near Brighton, Sussex. From 1894 to 1899 he attended St Paul's School in London, and in 1899 won a classical scholarship to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he was elected to the Cambridge Apostles. Other members included Lytton Strachey, John Maynard Keynes, G.E. Moore and E. M. Forster, as well as Bertrand Russell. Thoby Stephen, Virginia Stephen's brother, was friendly with the Apostles, though not a member himself. Woolf was awarded his B.A. degree in 1902 but stayed for a fifth year to study for the civil service examination.
In October 1904 Woolf moved to 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, he resigned in early 1912 and that same year married Adeline Virginia Stephen (Virginia Woolf).
As a couple, Leonard and Virginia Woolf became influential in the Bloomsbury group, which also included various other 'Apostles'. In December 1917, he was one of the co-founders of the 1917 Club which met in Gerrard Street, Soho.
Read more about this topic: Leonard Woolf
Famous quotes containing the words early and/or life:
“Men and women are not born inconstant: they are made so by their early amorous experiences.”
—Andre Maurois (1885–1967)
“The two elements the traveler first captures in the big city are extrahuman architecture and furious rhythm. Geometry and anguish. At first glance, the rhythm may be confused with gaiety, but when you look more closely at the mechanism of social life and the painful slavery of both men and machines, you see that it is nothing but a kind of typical, empty anguish that makes even crime and gangs forgivable means of escape.”
—Federico García Lorca (1898–1936)