'Sir Leslie Stephen' (
November 28,
1832 –
February 22,
1904) was an
English author, critic and mountaineer, and the father of
Virginia Woolf and
Vanessa Bell.
Life
Stephen was born at
Kensington Gore in
London, the brother of
James Fitzjames Stephen and grandson of
James Stephen. His family had belonged to the
Clapham Sect, the early
18th century group of mainly
evangelical Christian social reformers. At his father's house he saw a good deal of the
Macaulays,
James Spedding, Sir
Henry Taylor and
Nassau Senior. After studying at
Eton College and
Trinity Hall, Cambridge, where he graduated B.A. (20th
wrangler) in
1854 and M.A. in
1857, Stephen remained for several years a fellow and tutor of his
college. He recounted some of his experiences in a chapter in his ''Life of Fawcett'' as well as in some less formal Sketches from ''Cambridge: By a Don'' (1865). These sketches were reprinted from the ''
Pall Mall Gazette'', to the proprietor of which, George Smith, he had been introduced by his brother. It was at Smith's house at Hampstead that Stephen met his first wife, Harriet Marion (1840 - 1875), daughter of
William Makepeace Thackeray, with whom he had a daughter, Laura Makepeace Stephen (1870 - 1945); after her death he married Julia Prinsep Jackson (1846 - 1895), widow of Herbert Duckworth. By her, he was the father of
Virginia Woolf and
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