Leonard Woolf - Early Life

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.