Leslie Stephen

Leslie Stephen (1832-1904), father of the novelist Virginia Woolf, was the first editor of the Dictionary of National Biography. It was an immense work, for no compilation of so comprehensive a nature had yet been attempted. In this 1968 study, Phyllis Grosskurth argues that although the Dictionary of National Biography was Stephen’s ‘supreme work’, the remainder of his work is not inconsiderable, from The Playground of Europe (1871), to his works of contemporary agnostic thought: Essays in Freethinking and Plainspeaking (1873) and An Agnostic’s Apology (1893).