Leonard Sidney Woolf was born in London in 1880. He was the third of ten children of Jewish lawyer Solomon Rees Sydney and Marie (de Jongh) Woolf.
He studied at St Paul's School in London, and in 1899 won a scholarship from Trinity College of Cambridge to study the classics. There he was elected to the exclusive group of the "Apostles" of Cambridge, where he would befriend Lytton Strachey, Clive Bell, Stephen Thoby, John Maynard Keynes, E. M. Forster, and Beltrand Russell. Part of this clique would later be part of the Bloomsbury Circle. Between 1904 and 1911 he served in the Civil Colonial Service in Ceylon. Back in England, he married in August 1912 with the sister of his former classmate Thoby Stephen, Adeline Virginia Stephen (who will henceforth be known as Virginia Woolf). Then leave the Colonial Service and gather around the Circle of Bloomsbury. It is in those years when he begins to write. In 1913 publishes its first novel, A town in the jungle, inspired in part in its experiences in the colonies. A year later appears The wise virgins (written between October of 1912 and August of 1913). After the outbreak of the Great War he focuses his interests on the study of politics and sociology. He joins the Labor Party and the Fabian Society, as well as becoming a regular contributor to the New Statesman. In 1916 publishes the treaty International Goverment, that influences powerfully in the creation of the Society of Nations. It was during those years when his wife Virginia worsened his increasingly frequent manic-depressive attacks. Always aware of the health of his wife, and partly to procure a distraction, in 1917 he bought a small manual printing machine with which he founded the celebrated Hogarth Press, an editorial that he directed until his death, and in which he published, besides The works of Virginia Woolf herself, works by friends like TS Eliot - from the one who edited The Waste Land -, Katherine Mansfield and EM Forster, with designs by the painter Vanessa Bell (sister of Virginia). In 1941, in spite of the care given by her husband, Virginia commits suicide, and shortly afterwards Woolf falls in love with Trekkie Parsons, a married illustrator, twenty-two years his junior; This relationship will last a quarter of a century. Leonard Woolf died on August 14, 1969. His ashes were scattered in the grounds of Monk's House in Rodmell, Sussex.