Leslie Stephen was born five months after British Parliament passed the First Reform Bill extending the male franchise-an auspicious birth year for one of the eminent reform writers of the Victorian period. During his lifetime Stephen was a noted man of letters, first editor of The Dictionary of National Biography (from 1885 to 1891), and a passionate mountain climber. Shortly after his death in 1904 Stephen was relegated to critical obscurity; however, he has slowly regained recognition beyond that accorded him as the father of one of the twentieth century's greatest writers, Virginia Woolf. Today Stephen has become known also for his militant agnosticism and his contributions to the major religious, social, ethical, and political controversies of his day.

As a reformer he argued for the admission of Dissenters to universities and for parliamentary reform, though he opposed women's suffrage; he discoursed on British-American relations and the American Civil War, intervened...