Sir Leslie Stephen (28 November 1832 – 22 February 1904) was an English author, critic, historian, biographer, mountaineer, and an Ethical movement activist. He was also the father of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell and the founder of England's Dictionary of National Biography.
Life
Sir Leslie Stephen came from a distinguished intellectual family, and was born at a house on Kensington Gore, later 42 Hyde Park Gate, in London, the son of Sir James Stephen and his wife, Jane Catherine (née Venn). His father was Colonial Undersecretary of State and a noted abolitionist. He was the fourth of five children, his siblings including James Fitzjames Stephen (1829–1894) and Caroline Emelia Stephen (1834–1909).
His family had belonged to the Clapham Sect, the early 19th-century group of mainly evangelical Christian social reformers. At his father's house, he saw a good deal of the Macaulays, James Spedding, Sir Henry Taylor and Nassau Senior. Leslie Stephen was educated at Eton College, King's College London and Trinity Hall, Cambridge, where he graduated B.A. (20th wrangler) in 1854 and M.A. in 1857. He was elected a fellow of Trinity Hall in 1854 and became a junior tutor in 1856.
In 1859, he was ordained, but his study of philosophy, together with his perception of the religious controversies surrounding the publication of On the Origin of Species (1859) by Charles Darwin, led to his losing his faith in 1862, and in 1864 he resigned from his positions at Cambridge, and moved to London. He recounted some of his experiences in a chapter in his Life of Fawcett as well as in some less formal Sketches from Cambridge: By a Don (1865). These sketches were reprinted from The Pall Mall Gazette, to the proprietor of which, George Murray Smith, he had been introduced by his brother.
