Leonard Woolf

Leonard Sidney Woolf was an English political theorist, author, publisher and civil servant, and husband of author Virginia Woolf. Woolf was born in London, the third of ten children of Solomon Rees Sydney, a Jewish barrister and Queen's Counsel and Marie . After his father died in 1892, Woolf was sent to board at Arlington House School near Brighton, Sussex. From 1894 to 1899 he attended St Paul's School in London, and in 1899 won a classical scholarship to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he was elected to the Cambridge Apostles. Other members included Lytton Strachey, John Maynard... Keynes, G.E. Moore and E. M. Forster, as well as Bertrand Russell. Thoby Stephen, Virginia Stephen's brother, was friendly with the Apostles, though not a member himself. Woolf was awarded his B.A. degree in 1902 but stayed for a fifth year to study for the civil service examination. In October 1904 Woolf moved to Sri Lanka to become a cadet in the Ceylon Civil Service, in Jaffna and later Kandy, and by August 1908 was named an assistant government agent in the Southern Province, where he administered the District of Hambantota.
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