Leslie Stephen

Abstract

Leslie Stephen has been described by his grandson as ‘in a sense the father of Bloomsbury’ (Q. Bell, Bloomsbury, pl. facing p. 32). He was not only the actual father of the author and the painter who formed Bloomsbury’s nucleus; he was also an eminent Victorian man of letters whose moral philosophy, intellectual histories, literary criticism and biographies reveal, when compared with Bloomsbury’s writings, many of the fundamental continuities and discontinuities between nineteenth- and twentieth-century English literature.