Leonard Woolf: a life Victoria Glendinning Simon & Schuster, 530pp, £25 ISBN 0393026159

At the age of 88, Leonard Woolf looked back over his 57 years of political work and wrote, with characteristic precision: "I see clearly that I achieved practically nothing . . . The world today . . . would be exactly the same as it is if I had played ping-pong instead of sitting on committees and writing books and memoranda." This blanket dismissal must include his numerous contributions - reports, reviews and articles - to the New Statesman. His first report appeared in June 1913, and from then on he was closely associated with the paper, occasionally taking over its editorship from Kingsley Martin in the 1940s and sitting on the board. For Victoria Glendinning, the New Statesman was "Leonard's own paper", its political attitudes usually close to his own. Forty years after his declaration, old Labour supporters committed to greater social justice and international peace, as he was, will know exactly how he felt.

Woolf was a tough-minded man; when things looked at their most bleak, he found comfort in the view that, ultimately, "nothing matters". Yet his realism and scepticism never undermined his dedication to the causes he believed in. This was not the only respect in which he was a paradoxical character: as a Jew, he felt an outsider ("They do not like us, you know," says a character in one of his short stories), but he was infatuated with England and Englishness, and devoted his life to improving its condition; he believed in the value and importance of good government while sympathising with the underdog; his emotional life was both highly reserved and uninhibitedly passionate.

If only for the range of his public interests and activities, Woolf has long deserved an adequate biography. To do justice to a man who displayed so many inconsistencies and who (for all his self-doubt) contributed so substantially to the Labour Party, Bloomsbury and to the well-being of his wife, Virginia, a man who lived so long and so productively, was always going to be a challenge. Nor is the task made any easier by Woolf's volumes of autobiography, which, though comparatively short, are exceptionally open, self-knowing and self-judging. Near the end of her biography, Glendinning observes that "anyone trying to make a chronology of his life by using [Woolf's] autobiographies would have a nervous breakdown". Certainly, his numerous friendships, books, schemes, actions and reactions do not easily meld or melt into a single coherent narrative.

As the life of Leonard progresses, it grows wider and less concentrated, particularly after Virginia's suicide in 1941, the great watershed in Leonard's life. This is partly because of the imaginative vitality that Virginia herself contributed to the narrative of their life together. Though early Penguin books identified her as "the daughter of Sir Leslie Stephen, KCB, and the wife of Leonard Woolf", interest in both her father and her husband today is primarily through their relationships with her - relationships she helped to characterise through her own accounts. Leonard is scarcely glimpsed in Virginia's fiction (he may be the "man in an apron down in the basement working at a case of type" who "looked up over his spectacles and smiled at her"), but she relayed the story of their life together so vividly in letters and diaries that it has acquired an almost mythological depth and richness for anyone retelling it.

Stories such as how her sister Vanessa interrupted their wedding with a question about her baby's name, how they acquired their first printing press, their first car and their subsequent excursions to the Continent, including their drive through a 1935 Nazi rally with Mitz the marmoset perched on Leonard's shoulder, taking the fascist salute, are recounted in Leonard's autobiography, but they had already gained momentum from Virginia having related them. Leonard evidently consulted his wife's diaries in writing the story of his own life. After her death, it is as if a colour film has reverted to black and white, though Leonard himself was also a storyteller, recalling sharp vignettes of his childhood, Cambridge and his seven years in Sri Lanka as a colonial civil servant.

Leonard was utterly stricken by Virginia's death, yet he continued to work as a publisher, reviewer and editor; he organised and consolidated Virginia's oeuvre, and he fell deeply in love again - with the painter Trekkie Ritchie. For the biographer, Leonard's outstanding intelligence, as well as his modesty and frankness, make his life more rather than less difficult to write: he anticipated the usual opportunities for probing beneath the psyche-armour (or "carapace", as he termed it). Nevertheless, out of a mountain of surviving diaries, letters and memoirs, many of them already in print, Glendinning has created an appealing portrait of Leonard as a man of energy and imagination, a man who continued to attract powerful and gifted women until his death at almost 90. At his funeral, Juliette Robson played a Bach suite on the cello and Peggy Ashcroft read Milton's "Lycidas" - tributes to his love for German music and English poetry.

Glendinning's generous biography does not ignore that Woolf could be grumpy and was too often cheese-paring, but her account does justice to his range of passions, his literary and political contributions and, above all, his human goodness - he was a man who knew how to live.

Julia Briggs is the author of "Virginia Woolf: an inner life" (Penguin) and "Reading Virginia Woolf" (Edinburgh University Press)

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