Sir Leslie Stephen

Allowed uncensored access to her father's library, she made rich use of it. Leslie Stephen once commented to himself that Ginia is devouring books, almost faster than I like. Her habit of voracious...

Adeline Virginia Stephen, later VW , was born at 22 Hyde Park Gate, Kensington, London, the third of the four children of Sir Leslie Stephen and Julia Prinsep Stephen .

Leslie Stephen , VW 's father, died of bowel cancer. He had become ill in 1900, and his slow decline was very hard on his children; Virginia's second serious bout of mental illness followed shortly afterwards.

As Virginia Stephen 's father was dying, Virginia's half-brother George Duckworth fondled her several times in a manner that amounted to sexual assault.

Virginia Stephen (later VW ) was reading widely and almost without restriction in her father 's library. This was to have a profound impact on her creative and critical work.

VW refused to deliver the Clark lecture series at Cambridge University , thereby also declining to succeed her father, scholar Leslie Stephen , in this honour.

VW refused E. M. Forster 's request for permission to nominate her to the Committee of the London Library , because of the library's policy against women members (a policy instituted by her father, Leslie Stephen ).

VW 's father, Sir Leslie Stephen (1832-1904), was a Victorian philosopher and historian of ideas . . . literary historian and critic, and—perhaps most important—a biographer. Mark Hussey writes that he was, after Matthew Arnold

Leslie Stephen 's daughter from his previous marriage, Laura (1868-1934), suffered from some form of mental disability and lived most of her life in institutions.Julia Stephen had three children from her first marriage...