Public servant, private saint

Leonard Woolf had a passion for animals, not unconnected with an appetite for control. Dogs (with the occasional mongoose or monkey) were his companions to the end of his life. Discussing human nature, he put them on an equal plane: ‘There are some people, usually dogs or old women, extremely simple and unintellectual, who instinctively know how to deal with life and with persons, and who display an extraordinary and admirable resistance to the cruelties of man, the malevolence of providence, and the miseries of existence.’

Woolf himself would never have included himself in this category; he could not be described as unintellectual; and far from being simple, though he had a massive moral directness, he was divided all his life between the pleasure he took in his literary and artistic circle of friends and his sense of public duty — as exemplified by his work for the Fabian Society and the League of Nations. Friendship won.

In fact, he coped with adversity every bit as positively as any of the dogs and old women whom he admired. His marriage at 31, in 1912, to an unstable genius, which would have broken many, brought out the best in him. He never ran away from his responsibilities as a husband, delighted in his wife Virginia’s company, protected her delicate emotions from upset and looked after her when the demons had taken her over. He resigned himself to a celibate, if not a wholly asexual, relationship with her, in spite of being a normally passionate man with the makings of a loving parent. Her suicide left him desolate, with the haunting feeling that perhaps he could have saved her; but his eventual discovery of a different love for the artist Marjorie ‘Trekkie’ Parsons is a tribute to his stoicism as well as to a relish for life which is so well conveyed in his own delightful, five-volume memoirs.