Sir Leslie Stephen

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 .

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...

Marie Souvestre was a free-thinking feminist, daughter of the French author and philosopher Emile Souvestre . Her school, Les Ruches, was widely admired for its academic rigour. It educated many outstanding women, including Beatrice Chamberlain

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.

She was forty to his twenty-two. He left Cambridge and took the India Office job in order to marry her. Her friends Julia Duckworth and Leslie Stephen , who married the next year, were...

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.

Minny , sister of Anne Thackeray (later ATR ) married Leslie Stephen .

ATR 's sister Minny (wife of Leslie Stephen ), who was pregnant for the fourth time, died of eclampsia.

A sister, Jane, born in July 1838, died at the age of nine months. ATR 's second sister, Harriet Marian or Minny, who did survive, was three years her junior. ATR tried to fill...

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...

His many literary acquaintances in London included Sir Leslie Stephen , Anne Thackeray Ritchie , and Adelaide Procter .

GM knew the poets Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Algernon Swinburne —he sometimes stayed with them while in London. He also knew Emma Caroline Wood , Lucie Duff Gordon , Leslie Stephen , Anne Thackeray Ritchie

During these years she met some leading liberal thinkers, such as John Stuart Mill (whom she heard in the House as he moved his suffrage amendment to the Reform Bill on 20 May 1867, less...

ST 's parents made connections through friendship as remarkable as those made for them by family descent. Her mother was a friend of many writers and intellectuals of both sexes, including Marie Belloc Lowndes ,...