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21 " Woolf ’s control over the production of her own work is a significant factor in her genesis as a writer. The Hogarth Press became an important and influential publishing house in the decades that followed. It was responsible, for example, for the first major works of Freud in English, beginning in 1922, and published significant works by key modernist writers such as T. S. Eliot and Gertrude Stein. Woolf herself set the type for the Hogarth edition ofEliot’s The Waste Land (1923), which he read to them in June 1922, and which she found to have ‘great beauty & force of phrase: symmetry; & tensity. What connects it together, I’m not so sure’ (D2 178). "
― , The Cambridge Introduction to Virginia Woolf
22 " Leonard Woolf was two years older than Virginia, whom he had first met in 1901 in the rooms of her brother Thoby at Cambridge. He went from St Paul’s School to Trinity College on a scholarship in 1899 and was thefirst Jew to be elected to the Cambridge Apostles. His father Sidney Woolf (1844–92) was a barrister who died prematurely, leaving his widow, Marie, with the care of their ten children. After Cambridge, Leonard reluctantlyentered the Colonial Civil Service and he served in Ceylon for seven years. The experience forged him as a passionate anti-imperialist. In 1911 he began writing a novel based on his experiences, but written from the point of view of the Sinhalese; The Village in the Jungle was published in 1913. This work may have influenced his wife’s novel The Voyage Out, which has a fictional colonial setting. On his return to England he became a committed socialist and he was active on the left for most of his life, publishing numerous pamphlets and books of significance on national and international politics. His role as intimate literary mentor to Virginia Woolf has sometimes overshadowed his considerable import as a political writer in his own right. "
23 " In January 1912 Leonard proposed marriage. She was unable to answer directly and he pressed further in a passionate letter: ‘It isn’t, really it isnt, merely because you are so beautiful – though of course that is a large reason & so it should be – that I love you: it is your mind & your character – I have never known anyone like you in that – wont you believe me? "