Leslie Stephen: The Godless Victorian
Condition: SECONDHAND
This is a secondhand book. The jacket image is a photograph of the exact copy we have in stock. This image shows the condition of this book. Further condition remarks are below.
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: Very good
Pages: Good
At the turbulent crossroads of Victorian faith and doubt stands Leslie Stephen — mountaineer, philosopher, editor, and father of Virginia Woolf — a man who renounced his clerical orders to become one of the nineteenth century's most formidable freethinkers. Noel Annan's authoritative biography chronicles the life of this towering intellectual figure, tracing his path from Cambridge don to the editorship of the monumental Dictionary of National Biography, against a backdrop of a society wrestling with Darwinism, religious scepticism, and the birth of modern agnosticism. Annan presents Stephen not merely as a biographical subject but as a lens through which to examine the entire intellectual climate of Victorian England, illustrating the profound tensions between inherited faith and the relentless demands of reason. Written with scholarly precision and narrative elegance, this biography argues that Stephen's courageous rejection of orthodoxy was not an act of destruction but of moral integrity, shaping the very foundations of secular thought in Britain. First published in 1984 and revised from Annan's earlier study, this remains the definitive portrait of a man whose restless, questioning mind continues to resonate — leaving the reader to wonder just how much of the modern world Stephen's godlessness helped to build.
Author: Noel Annan
Format: Hardback
Published: 1984, Weidenfeld and Nicolson
Genre: Biography
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: Very good
Pages: Good
At the turbulent crossroads of Victorian faith and doubt stands Leslie Stephen — mountaineer, philosopher, editor, and father of Virginia Woolf — a man who renounced his clerical orders to become one of the nineteenth century's most formidable freethinkers. Noel Annan's authoritative biography chronicles the life of this towering intellectual figure, tracing his path from Cambridge don to the editorship of the monumental Dictionary of National Biography, against a backdrop of a society wrestling with Darwinism, religious scepticism, and the birth of modern agnosticism. Annan presents Stephen not merely as a biographical subject but as a lens through which to examine the entire intellectual climate of Victorian England, illustrating the profound tensions between inherited faith and the relentless demands of reason. Written with scholarly precision and narrative elegance, this biography argues that Stephen's courageous rejection of orthodoxy was not an act of destruction but of moral integrity, shaping the very foundations of secular thought in Britain. First published in 1984 and revised from Annan's earlier study, this remains the definitive portrait of a man whose restless, questioning mind continues to resonate — leaving the reader to wonder just how much of the modern world Stephen's godlessness helped to build.