Sir Leslie Stephen was fifty years old when his second
daughter, Virginia, was born January 25, 1882. He had been
married before, to a daughter of Thackeray, and after her death
had remarried a widow with three children. He reared that family
and now was in the midst of rearing one of his own. Sir Leslie
was a renown literary critic, and was also a cantankerous old man,
not always a pleasant father to live with. Years after her father
was dead, Virginia, over fifty herself, wrote in her journal that had