As Virginia Woolf says in her 1932 centenary Times article, when she heard her father, Leslie Stephen, dropping books to the floor of his study in the 1890s, he had already lived a full life. Stephen was prolific in that nonchalant way the Victorians had about hard work. He wrote voluminously: philosophy, literary essays, reminiscences, and letters. As a biographer he wrote five books in the English Men of Letters series and three full-length biographies; he edited twenty-one volumes of The Dictionary of National Biography (1885-1901), coedited five volumes, and contributed a total of 386 entries to all but three of the original sixty-six volumes. Stephen set a standard for biography as clear, concise scholarly analysis of the subject's life, character, work, and influences.

Stephen's interest in writing was an inherited trait. His great-grandfather James Stephen, after leaving Scotland, surviving a shipwreck, and being arrested for debt, wrote an indictment...