This episode contains mention of suicide and sexual violence.

Welcome to Significant Others, a podcast that takes a look at the less familiar side of history.

I'm Liza Powell O'Brien, and in this episode, we meet a man who wanted nothing more than to be a genius, but he raised one instead.

He wouldn't send her to school, but he did give her the key to his library, and literature would never be the same again.

This time, on Significant Others, meet Sir Leslie Steven.

Virginia Wolfe was born at a time when women were not allowed to learn alongside their brothers.

Yet by the time of her death, she had become one of the 20th century's most notable authors.

Her work exists in dialogue with every writer from the Greeks to those working today, and her formal innovations bent the evolutionary arc of narrative prose.

How did a woman who did not go to school become a major contributor to the modernist movement?

Largely thanks to the man about whom she wrote, if he had not died, his life would have entirely ended mine.

That man was her father, Sir Leslie Steven, and her feelings for him were so deeply contradictory, they drove her mad, literally.

How was she supposed to feel about a man who had cultivated her mind, but then done nothing to ensure she would be free to use it?

A man who saw women as props for his own comfort, but was the first to see her as a writer.

He was entitled, narcissistic, and dangerously selfish. And yet, without him, she may never have had a career at all.

He was her father, and she loved him. He was her father, and she hated him.

Before he was Virginia Wolfe's father, Leslie Steven was a literary critic, an historian, and an academic.

He was ultimately knighted for his work, but he was not just a straight-up member of the establishment.

In fact, it could be said that the revolutionary spirit that led Virginia Wolfe to invent a new form of the novel came to her directly through him.

The Steven family had a long, progressive legacy. Both Leslie's father and his grandfather were respected lawyers who were instrumental in abolishing slavery from England.

And Leslie, who broke with tradition early by joining the clergy instead of the bar, ultimately realized once his father had died, that he didn't actually believe in God after all, and he certainly wasn't meant to be celibate.

He then struck out at the age of 30 to attempt a new career as a writer. Two decades later, his two greatest contributions to the world of literature were born, the dictionary of national biography and his daughter, Virginia.

Writing as it turns out was in the blood. Intracing the Steven clan back to the 18th century, Quentin Bell, Virginia's nephew and biographer, wrote,

...