Leslie Stephen

Alexander Pope (Dodo Press) Leslie Stephen

Sir Leslie Stephen, KCB (1832-1904) was an English author, critic and mountaineer, and the father of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell. While at Cambridge, Stephen became an Anglican clergyman. In 1865, having renounced his religious beliefs, and after a visit to the United States two years earlier, he settled in London and became a journalist, eventually editing the Cornhill Magazine in 1871 where R. L. Stevenson, Thomas Hardy, W. E. Norris, Henry James and James Payn figured among his contributors. In his spare time, he participated in athletics and mountaineering. He also contributed to the Saturday Review, Fraser, Macmillan, the Fortnightly and other periodicals. During the eleven years of his editorship, in addition to three volumes of critical studies, he made two valuable contributions to philosophical history and theory: History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century (1876) and The Science of Ethics (1882). Amongst his other works are Hours in a Library (1874), Samuel Johnson (1878), Alexander Pope (1880) and English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century (1904).