Sir Leslie Stephen (November 28, 1832-February 22, 1904) was an English author, critic, and mountaineer, and the father of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell.

Literary career: While at Cambridge, Stephen became an Anglican clergyman. In 1865, having renounced his religious beliefs, and after a visit to the United States two years earlier, where he had formed lasting friendships with Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., James Russell Lowell, and Charles Eliot Norton, he settled in London and became a journalist, eventually editing the Cornhill Magazine in 1871, where R. L. Stevenson, Thomas Hardy, W. E....