Sir Leslie Stephen

Sir Leslie Stephen 1832-1904, English author and critic. The first serious critic of the novel, he was also editor of the great Dictionary of National Biography from its beginning in 1882 until 1891. In 1859 he was ordained a minister. As a tutor at Cambridge his philosophical readings led him to skepticism, and later he relinquished his holy orders. He wrote several essays defending his agnostic position, notably Essays on Free Thinking and Plain Speaking (1873). He moved from Cambridge to London in 1864 and three years later married Harriet Marian, younger daughter of Thackeray . Some of the essays and sketches Stephen wrote for various periodicals were collected in Hours in a Library (1874-79). From 1871 to 1882 he was editor of Cornhill Magazine; during this time he encouraged such authors as Thomas Hardy , Robert Louis Stevenson , and Henry James . Throughout his life Stephen was a prominent athlete and mountaineer. He wrote numerous articles on the subject of mountain climbing, many of which were collected in The Playground of Europe (1871). His major works include History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century (1876); biographies of Johnson (1878), Pope (1880), Swift (1882), George Eliot (1902), and Hobbes (1904), all written for the "English Men of Letters" series; Science of Ethics (1882), which attempted to combine ethics with Darwin's theory of evolution; Studies of a Biographer (1898-1902); and The English Utilitarians (1900). Virginia Woolf was the younger of his two daughters by his second wife, Julia Jackson.

Bibliography: See biography by F. W. Maitland (1906, repr. 1968); studies by N. G. Annan (1951) and D. D. Zink (1972).

Stephen, Sir Leslie (1832–1904), son of Sir J. Stephen and brother of Sir J. F. Stephen, was educated at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, where he became tutor, having taken orders. From his family he inherited a strong tradition of evangelicalism and muscular Christianity, and he became a noted mountaineer: he edited the Alpine Journal, 1868–72, and the best of his Alpine essays were collected in The Playground of Europe (1871).

Stephen's reading of J. S. Mill, Comte, and Kant inclined him to scepticism, and by 1865 he had abandoned all belief. In 1864 he came to London and embarked on a literary career of prodigious industry and output, contributing articles to many periodicals. He was editor of the Cornhill (1871–82), then he became editor of the Dictionary of National Biography. His great work, History of English Thought in the 18th Century (1876), reviews the Deist controversy of that age, and the intuitional and utilitarian schools of philosophy. He also contributed several biographies to the English Men of Letters series and almost 400 entries to the DNB. His last important volume was English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century (1904). He was one of the most prominent intellectuals of his day (portrayed by his friend Meredith as Vernon Whitford in The Egoist).

Stephen's first wife was Thackeray's daughter ‘Minny’, who died in 1875. His acute grief, and his second marriage to Julia Duckworth, are both recorded in his autobiographical papers, written for his children by Julia (one of whom was V. Woolf) and step-children and published in 1977 (ed. A. Bell) as Mausoleum Book. Woolf portrays some aspects of his character in her portrait of Mr Ramsay in To the Lighthouse (1927).