Leslie Stephen

by

Gillian Fenwick

• LAST MODIFIED: 20 March 2025
• DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199799558-0224

Introduction

At the time of his death, Leslie Stephen (b. 1832–d. 1904) was arguably the most eminent English Victorian man of letters. He wrote more than 60 books and hundreds of essays and reviews on history, literature, ethics, mountaineering, politics, university life, social movements, agnosticism, and utilitarianism. In less than ten years as founding editor and contributor at the Dictionary of National Biography, he created what was then recognized as the model on which biography was written for decades. Respected by his peers, honored by universities, and created Knight Commander of the Bath, his life and work seemed remarkable. He had begun his writing life at a time when an educated gentleman with university, London clubland, political, and family connections had entry into writing for the magazines and newspapers with which mid-Victorian England teemed. Stephen was in a privileged position for an easy passage into the London literary scene as he left his clerical and academic life at Cambridge. His father, Sir James Stephen, had been an eminent politician, cabinet minister, and academic as well as a leading figure in the anti-slavery movement. His brother, James Fitzjames Stephen, was already a prolific political and legal journalist and essayist and became a leading jurist. He introduced Leslie Stephen to publishers and editors, who immediately employed him. With the encouragement of the publisher George Smith, he met and married Thackeray’s younger daughter, and he joined the Athenaeum Club. He was sought after as a writer and editor, and he was almost immediately financially secure. Though no more than an amateur at the start of his career, in the 1860s he quickly established himself as a journalist, editor, philosopher, political commentator, literary critic, and lecturer. The DNB, which he edited 1882–1891, confirmed his eminence and secured his place in literary history. Yet he died isolated and unhappy, doubting the value of his work, convinced he would be derided if not forgotten by future generations. In many ways he was right. In 1904 glowing obituaries were written, but most of his books were already out of print. Even the term “man of letters” belonged to another age as academic critics and learned journals replaced the amateurs, hacks, and popular monthly magazine essays of Stephen’s heyday. He might have remained in obscurity but for the literary phenomenon of his daughter, Virginia Woolf. When her work and life became beacons of late-20th-century feminism, Leslie Stephen’s name was resurrected though his reputation fell into tatters. Her published diaries, letters, and autobiographical essays bitterly criticized him, and the new feminist critics often blamed him for the miseries in her life. Yet he is today again accorded respect for his Victorian reputation thanks to the work of late-20th-century academic study of what he wrote and what he achieved, notwithstanding his personal shortcomings.

Biography and Autobiography

In 1895, mourning the death of his second wife, Stephen wrote a long, autobiographical letter to his children, subsequently revised by him but unpublished in his lifetime. Bell 1977 is a meticulous scholarly edition of which Stephen would undoubtedly have approved, setting the work in context from a position of enlightened hindsight. Months before his death, Stephen wrote four essays, titled Some Early Impressions, for the National Review and Atlantic Monthly, as close to published autobiography as he came. In 1924 the Woolfs’ Hogarth Press published the essays in book form (Stephen 1924). Two years after his death, his friend the legal historian Frederic William Maitland, published a sympathetic commemorative biography and selection of letters (Maitland 1906). Noel Annan wrote two biographies on Stephen, emphasizing his place in the history of ideas (Annan 1951 and Annan 1984). Important also are the two Dictionary of National Biography (DNB) articles on Stephen, one by his fellow editor, Sidney Lee (Lee 1912), and the other by Bell in the DNB (Bell 2004). Throughout biographies and critical studies of Virginia Woolf there are brief analyses of Stephen, sometimes inaccurate and speculative. Woolf herself also wrote about her father in her fiction, nonfiction, diaries, and letters (Woolf 1927 and Woolf 1950).

• Annan, Noel. Leslie Stephen: His Thought and Character in Relation to his Time. London: MacGibbon and Kee, 1951.

  Nicely complements Maitland 1906, with fewer personal dates and details and more analysis of Stephen’s work. Situates his writings in the context of intellectual history rather than commenting on their individual merits as books or essays. Annan sees him as central to the methodology of the history of ideas, drawing attention to Stephen’s anticipation of such scholarship in his History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century (1876).

• Annan, Noel. Leslie Stephen: The Godless Victorian. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1984.

  Far more than a revision of Annan 1951, the new biography situates Stephen as a rationalist utilitarian who separated morality from religion. Annan’s exploration of the intellectual background to Stephen’s work takes him into perhaps less relevant speculation on areas Stephen ignored or which post-dated him.

• Bell, Alan. “Stephen, Sir Leslie.” In Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.

  DOI: 10.1093/ref:odnb/36271

  The most recent, scholarly, comprehensive, and accurate account of Stephen’s life and work. The most balanced biographical account, short but definitive. Available by subscription.

• Bell, Alan, ed. Sir Leslie Stephen’s Mausoleum Book. Oxford: Clarendon, 1977.

  Stephen’s intimate family memoir written for his children after the death of his second wife, Julia. Although its stated purpose is to celebrate her life, it is firmly centered around his own.

• Bicknell, John W. “Leslie Stephen.” In Dictionary of Literary Biography. Vol. 57, Victorian Prose Writers after 1867. Edited by William B. Thesing, 278–293. Detroit: Gale Research, 1987.

  A good starting point for research in a general survey of his writing life.

• Lee, Sidney. “Stephen, Sir Leslie.” In Dictionary of National Biography, 1901–1911. Edited by Sidney Lee, 398–405. London: Smith, Elder, 1912.

  More than a dictionary entry, Lee’s account of Stephen’s life is detailed and surprisingly frank. His closest colleague during their time together at the DNB, Stephen and Lee complemented each other, the one ardent and volatile, the other a workhorse.

• Maitland, Frederic William. The Life and Letters of Leslie Stephen. London: Duckworth, 1906.

  Written at Stephen’s request, and perhaps inevitably full of praise for the man, his life, and his work, but without comment on or critical appraisal of his writing. But, scholar that he was, Maitland’s research on dates and events is scrupulously reported. Not all the published letters survive.

• Stephen, Leslie. Some Early Impressions. London: Hogarth, 1924.

  A sentimental memoir about his youth, education, and university life in the 1850s and 1860s, written shortly before his death, commissioned by The National Review and reprinted in The Atlantic Monthly, in four instalments September–December 1903. The Hogarth Press edition has no additional editorial or biographical material and only the dust jacket notes their origin.

• Woolf, Virginia. To the Lighthouse. London: Hogarth, 1927.

  Fictional portrait of Stephen as a remote father figure and the tensions within the family.

• Woolf, Virginia. “Leslie Stephen.” In The Captain’s Deathbed and Other Essays. By Virginia Woolf, 67–73. London: Hogarth, 1950.

  A harsh criticism of her father and the effect he had and, had he lived longer, might have had on her life, writing, and creativity.