Before Leonard: The Early Suitors of Virginia Woolf

From the historian Lytton Strachey (who made and then quickly retracted his proposal of marriage) to the war poet and neo-pagan Rupert Brooke (who led groups of naked young men round the fields of Grantchester), Sarah M. Hall looks at all Virginia Woolf’s unsuitable early suitors. Woolf’s work has frequently been seen against the backdrop of the Bloomsbury Group or her relationship with Vita Sackville-West. But the men considered in this book had an important impact on Woolf’s work too - and veiled portraits of most of them appear in her novels. Before Leonard brings brand new material and a brand new perspective to the fertile ground of Woolf studies.