United under fallen elms

Christopher Ondaatje looks at the life of the husband of a literary icon and the underrated legacy he left behind

Eclipsed by his wife Virginia and relegated to the supporting role of attendant to a literary genius, and also maligned as a manipulative social climber who even helped to cause Virginia Woolf's death, Leonard Woolf has been overlooked as a man worthy of critical attention in his own right. This first biography of him may at last set the record straight and explain why Virginia might not have become the writer she became had it not been for Leonard. Victoria Glendinning redresses the imbalance and goes some way to explaining the riddle of their extraordinary marriage. She also offers interesting opinions about the interlocking characters of the Bloomsbury Group, who strongly influenced the new wave of writing, painting and thinking in the early part of the 20th century.

Leonard Woolf's five-volume autobiography, published between 1960 and 1969, is a fascinating, highly readable but often circuitous account of a notable life. Glendinning acknowledges that anyone trying to make a chronology of Woolf's life from this source would have a nervous breakdown. Her triumph is not only that she manages to condense and order Leonard's material but that she uses every other available source to produce a definitive picture. Although Leonard Woolf contains neither introduction nor conclusion, its 19 chapters relay Woolf's life chronologically with clarity and balance.

It was Leonard's nature as a deep thinker that helped lead to his affiliation with the Bloomsbury Group. Born in 1880, the grandson of a Jewish tailor and the son of a successful barrister, early privilege gave way to financial struggle when his father died in 1882 leaving the family without an income. At 13 he won a scholarship to St Paul's School, but did not really fit in, being too intellectual and perhaps too Jewish. He learnt to adapt by creating a "carapace" - a mask to protect him from the outside and hostile world - which he could not easily remove as an adult.

In 1899, he went up to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he forged important friendships with future members of the Bloomsbury Group: with Lytton Strachey, Thoby Stephen (brother of Virginia and Vanessa), Saxon Sydney-Turner and Clive Bell - all of whom feature in the excellent illustration section of the book. Membership of the exclusive Apostles debating society, into which John Maynard Keynes was initiated, was of more importance to Leonard than academic excellence, although he was greatly influenced by the philosopher G. E. Moore and his explorations of truth. His personal relationships at Cambridge were to prove paramount. In 1903, Thoby introduced him to Virginia and her sister Vanessa for the first time, and he was awed by their "astonishing beauty".

Woolf did not shine by Cambridge standards and failed to achieve the high marks required to enter the Home Civil Service. Instead, he was offered a cadetship in the Ceylon Civil Service.

Glendinning encapsulates Woolf's seven years in Ceylon, 1904-11, with passionate understanding. She vividly describes the country and the bureaucratic methods by which the British governed Ceylon, and the rules and regulations of a system where everything taxable was taxed. Leonard arrived an innocent, unconscious imperialist. He learnt to be "pedantically strict". He also lost his virginity to a Burgher girl (a small but influential mixed-race community with Dutch blood). And he wrote constantly to Strachey, who demanded to know everything about Leonard's whores; in his replies. Strachey gave details of his male lovers at Cambridge. After suffering from attacks of malaria and typhoid, Leonard was posted to supervise a pearl fishery amid suffocating heat and the stench of rotting oysters. In Kandy, the chief hill station of Ceylon, he was horrified to be in charge of whippings and hangings, and began to realise his anti-imperialist tendencies.

From England, Strachey urged his friend to marry Virginia Stephen, and so the stage was set when Woolf returned from Ceylon in 1911 on a year's leave. Leonard and Virginia's friendship blossomed and soon, knowing only a little of her mental instability, he fell "terminally and unconditionally in love with Virginia". He recorded that period as the most exciting of his life and the time when "Bloomsbury" really came into being. When his period of leave was up in May 1912, instead of returning to Ceylon he resigned from the Ceylon Civil Service and, though penniless and despite Virginia having told him that "I feel no physical attraction in you", he proposed to her. They were married in August 1912.

Everyone then, and now, has been curious about the sexual aspect of their relationship. Glendinning tactfully explains: "The marriage was consummated, not infrequently, but incompletely." After the honeymoon, Leonard involved himself in political journalism. Virginia revised her first novel, The Voyage Out , and Leonard published his first novel, The Village in the Jungle , in 1913. The book proves his literary ability beyond doubt, and his suitability, not least in this respect, to be the husband of Virginia. As Glendinning remarks, "writing at this level shows that Leonard was supremely the right man to be with Virginia... His intuitive capacity is nakedly demonstrated in The Village in the Jungle ".

But Virginia's first suicide attempt, in 1913, cast a pall over their lives. The book's account of how the Woolfs endured the Great War is really the story of how Leonard, while caring for Virginia, started his political and writing career and established the Hogarth Press. Throughout the 1920s, the Hogarth Press grew, publishing T. S. Eliot, Leonard's short-story collection Stories of the East , Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Freud and Virginia herself. At the same time, besides advising his wife on her writing, Leonard extended generous support to many others, including E. M. Forster, who joked that Leonard should receive a percentage of the royalties for A Passage to India for all his encouragement and advice. But Leonard himself stopped writing fiction altogether, became literary editor of The Nation and confined his writing to politics, especially comment on the League of Nations and socialism.

In 1924, Virginia met Vita Sackville-West, whose books were published by Hogarth. They became lovers in 1925, although Leonard did not know the full truth. Vita inspired Orlando , and after its publication in 1928, the Hogarth Press was profitable and the Woolfs reasonably well off.

By the 1930s, Leonard's political star was rising. He was appointed to the executive committee of the New Fabian Research Bureau and continued to write for The New Statesman , maintaining a fairly stormy friendship with its editor, Kingsley Martin. He produced books of political writing, notably After the Deluge . At the same time, behind the scenes, he supported Virginia, who wrote ominously in her diary on May 28, 1931: "If it were not for the divine goodness of L. how many times I should be thinking of death."

The beginning of the Second World War was a bad time for the Woolfs. They had visited Nazi Germany in the mid-1930s and were in no doubt about what a Nazi invasion of Britain would mean for Jews such as Leonard. They made a joint suicide plan. An anxious Virginia told Leonard: "I don't want to die yet", but she sank into depression, lost all power for words and could not stop her hands from trembling. Leonard knew the symptoms but could not decide whether or not to commit her to a "drastic regime". He perhaps made the wrong decision and took no drastic action. He saw his wife alive for the last time on March 28, 1941. She told him she was going for a walk before lunch, and Leonard, finding two letters (one to Vanessa and one to him) feared the worst. She had drowned herself in the nearby River Ouse, although her body was not discovered until almost three weeks later. A distraught Leonard buried her ashes under one of two elm trees at the edge of the garden and began "what might have been a perilous isolation at Monks House". In early January 1943, two days after his friend Trekkie Parsons visited him and stayed at Monks House, the elm was blown over in a storm.

Leonard's relationship with Trekkie after Virginia died has been the subject of much conjecture. She was married to Ian Parsons, the senior publishing executive of Chatto and Windus. As Glendinning explains:

"Leonard, at 62, was head over heels in love." Trekkie was 20 years younger than him and slept in the spare bedroom. Glendinning speculates that although they had a "passionately erotic relationship... she was almost certainly not his mistress".

In Leonard's last decade, he derived a great deal of pleasure from his loving relationship with Trekkie, as he did from "eating and drinking, reading, walking and riding, cultivating a garden, games of every kind, animals of every kind, conversation, pictures, music, friendship, love, people". He died on August 14, 1969. Trekkie buried his ashes next to Virginia's under the surviving elm tree. It too blew down in a storm a short while later.

Leonard Woolf contains the qualities that Woolf himself admired and possessed: truthfulness, integrity and rationality. With her compelling account, Glendinning has done a great service to Woolf by refusing to simplify a complex life.

Christopher Ondaatje is the author of Woolf in Ceylon and a trustee of the National Portrait Gallery.