Alpine climber and essayist, editor of the Cornhill Magazine and the Dictionary of National Biography, literary critic and historian, biographer, militant agnostic, historian of ideas, eminent pedestrian, Leslie Stephen has been called the next most important Victorian man of letters after Matthew Arnold. On whichever rung of the ladder of eminence one wishes to place him, there is no doubt that he ranks much higher than the attention paid him until recently by twentieth-century critics and scholars would indicate. In the last decade, however, he has been receiving more scrutiny, in part because he was the father of Virginia Woolf, but equally in recognition of his own intellectual power and literary skill. Noël Annan's Leslie Stephen: The Godless Victorian (1984), a much augmented version of his earlier study Leslie Stephen: His Thought and Character in Relation to His Time (1951), is illuminated by scholarly and critical work of...