Highly learned and first-rate social and political leaders in Maharashtra VishnuShastri Chipalunkar, VasudevShastri Khare, Vaman Shivram Apte, Bal Gangadhar Tilak, and Gopal Ganesh Agarkar started in 1880 New English School in Pune with nationalistic fervor.

Apte voraciously read Marathi, Sanskrit, and English literature in his high school and college days, the last including plays of Shakespeare and Molière, novels of Walter Scott and George W. M. Reynolds, and poetry of John Keats and Percy Shelley.

He also read the works of John Stuart Mill, Herbert Spencer, Edmund Burke, Francis Bacon, Thomas Macaulay and Samuel Johnson.

While Apte was in high school, in 1882, his teacher Gopal Ganesh Agarkar published a translation of Shakespeare's Hamlet into Marathi, naming it Wikar Wilasita (विकारविलसित).

He edited the weekly for 27 years, presenting to Marathi readership a vast body of literature which included novels, short stories, poems, thought-provoking essays, biographical sketches, translations, and adaptations.

In an early article, Apte announced promotion of social reform in Maharashtra besides Marathi readers' entertainment as the important objective of his writings.

He had once said that there is not a "single character in my social novels which I have not witnessed in the society.” During 1897–1907, there was a plague epidemic in India, and Apte selflessly volunteered for the welfare of suffering public in Maharashtra.