Leonard and Virginia Woolf

This work, an "anti-Bloomsbury" book, aims to restore perceptions of Leonard and Virginia Woolf to a more realistic level and to try to answer the question of how much literary influence, if any, they had on each other. The author propounds the argument that, in fact, they each influenced the other's writing in important ways. For example, Virginia stimulated Leonard to write prose fiction in the first place, influenced his choice of subject matter and then influenced him to turn to the factual writing at which he so excelled. In contrast, Leonard's influence on Virginia was more complex, and harder to document, partly because her fiction was more subtle than his. His chief literary influence on her was the way in which he forced her to focus on her relationship with the world of what she called "non-being" and what most other people would call physical reality - the world of facts, objects, people and everyday relationships. In doing this, Leonard had a profound effect on Virginia's writng in terms of both style and content.