Volume 14, Number 8 · April 23, 1970
The Perfectly Candid Man
By Stephen Spender
Sowing: An Autobiography of the Years 1880-1904
by Leonard Woolf
Harcourt, Brace & World, 224 pp., $5.95
Growing: An Autobiography of the Years 1904-1911
by Leonard Woolf
Harcourt, Brace & World, 256 pp., $5.95
Beginning Again: An Autobiography of the Years 1911-1918
by Leonard Woolf
Harcourt, Brace & World, 288 pp., $5.95
Downhill All the Way: An Autobiography of the Years 1919-1939
by Leonard Woolf
Harcourt, Brace & World, 259 pp., $5.95
The Journey Not the Arrival Matters
by Leonard Woolf
Harcourt, Brace & World, 210 pp., $5.95
Born in 1880, Leonard Woolf died in 1969, having corrected the proofs of The Journey Not the Arrival Matters, the last volume of his autobiography, a few weeks before he died. As the opening pages of Sowing, the first of these five volumes, show, he was intensely conscious of his Jewish origins on both sides of his family. His grandfather was Benjamin Woolf, a fairly prosperous London tailor (but on whose death certificate, Leonard points out, was written simply 'gentleman'). His father, Sidney Woolf, rose above trade and became an extremely successful barrister. Leonard's mother came from what Leonard calls a 'soft' Dutch Jewish family (her father was a diamond merchant), the De Jonghs. They had nine children, of whom Leonard was the second son. Sidney Woolf died in 1892, when Leonard was only twelve, and his mother from having been affluent was reduced to difficult financial circumstances. Luckily her sons were most of them clever, and Leonard was one of the four who got scholarships at St Paul's School in London and of the three who got scholarships at Cambridge.
Review, 5177 words
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