1882-1904

Since F.W. Maitland's Life and Letters of Leslie Stephen (1907), there has been no volume of the letters written by this extraordinary and eminent Victorian. Alpinist, literary critic, god-killer, editor of The Cornhill Magazine and The Dictionary of National Biography, biographer, historian of ideas, and father of Vanessa Bell and Virginia Woolf, Stephen corresponded with a host of men and women, including such notables as his American friends - James Russell Lowell, Justice Holmes and art historian Charles E. Norton; such contemporaries among the intelligentsia as John Morley, Henry Sidgwick, George Eliot, Robert Louis Stevenson, F.W. Maitland, and Thomas Hardy; and the members of his family - Minny, his first wife; his sister-in-law, Anny Ritchie; his son Thoby; and his best beloved second wife, Julia. In his letters, always readable, we find his enthusiasms, his ironic humour, his self-doubt and self-pity, his anguish over his retarded child Laura, his candour, his lively portraits of people and places, his delight in the young - Nessa, Ginia and Thoby, and his direct and easy style as he responds to his reader's interests and needs. This second volume follws the demanding year