Leslie Stephen Among the Women – Christine Froula

Christine Froula

Victorian intellectual Leslie Stephen’s public and private stances toward women, as well as actual and fictional women in his personal orbit and public purview, cast fresh, scintillating light over his life, work, and biography. This talk foregrounds a select array of the women in Stephen’s private and public life to sketch backgrounds for his daughter Virginia Woolf’s striking autobiographical and fictional portraits of the Stephen family. Putting Leslie Stephen’s life and thought in dialogue with Woolf’s critical transformation of her loving, “adorable,” “somehow tremendous” father’s rich intellectual and ambivalent emotional legacies—his advanced thinking and his blind spots—I highlight the limits of Stephen’s progressive image as a writer of essays he hoped would shock the public, such as “An Agnostic’s Apology” (1876), and his negative-dialectical influence on Woolf’s powerful social critique of the socioeconomic sex/gender system.