The Bloomsbury Group or
Bloomsbury Set was a group of writers,
intellectuals and artists who held informal discussions in Bloomsbury
throughout the 20th
century. This English
collective
of friends and relatives lived, worked or studied near Bloomsbury
in London
during the
first half of the twentieth century. Their work deeply
influenced
literature,
aesthetics,
criticism,
and
economics as well as modern attitudes
towards
feminism,
pacifism, and
sexuality. Its best known members were
Virginia Woolf,
John Maynard Keynes,
E. M. Forster, and
Lytton
Strachey.
Description
Almost everything about Bloomsbury appears to be controversial,
including its membership and name. Group, for example, is the best
general classification rather than set, as some think (including
revisers of this article) which implies their cohesion was simply
social. They also never 'held' formal or informal discussions of
anything, but talked about all kinds of things all the time. It is
now generally accepted, however, that the Group originally
consisted of the novelists and essayists
Virginia Woolf,
E. M. Forster, and
Mary MacCarthy, the biographer and
essayist
Lytton Strachey, the
economist
John Maynard Keynes,
the painters
Duncan Grant,
Vanessa Bell, and
Roger
Fry, poet
Oliver W F Lodge and
the critics of literature, art, and politics, Strachey, Fry,
Desmond MacCarthy,
Clive Bell, and
Leonard
Woolf.
Vanessa Bell and Virginia Woolf were sisters, and their brothers,
the older
Thoby and the younger
Adrian, were also original members of
the group, as were some other Cambridge figures such as the
enigmatic Saxon Sydney-Turner. Lytton Strachey and Duncan Grant -
later Vanessa’s partner - were cousins. During the earlier years of
the group’s history there were various affairs among the
individuals.
Most of the members lived for considerable
periods of time in the West Central 1 district of London known as
Bloomsbury, and ‘group’ seems to be the best general term to
describe the nature of their association, which was not merely
social as the terms ‘circle’ or ‘set’ may imply.
A remarkable historical feature of these friends and relations is
that their close relationships all predated their fame as writers,
artists, and thinkers. Yet close friends, brothers, sisters, and
even sometimes partners of the friends were not necessarily members
of Bloomsbury. Lytton Strachey’s companion the painter
Dora Carrington was never a member; Keynes’s
wife
Lydia Lopokova was only
reluctantly accepted into the group . Other members mentioned in
Woolf's letters and diaries as members included socialite and
hostess
Lady Ottoline Morrell,
Virginia Woolf's long term lover
Vita Sackville-West, and
Arthur Waley.
Essentialist definers of Bloomsbury
have sometimes questioned the existence of the group. Yet the lives
and works of the group members show an overlapping, interconnected
similarity of ideas and attitudes that helped to keep the friends
and relatives together. Their convictions about the nature of
consciousness and its relation to external nature, about the
fundamental separateness of individuals that involves both
isolation and love, about the human and non-human nature of time
and death, and about the ideal goods of truth love and beauty – all
these were largely shared , underlie the group’s core
dissatisfactions with capitalism and its wars of imperialism .
These "Bloomsbury assumptions" are also reflected in member's
criticisms of materialistic realism in painting and fiction as well
as attacks on what Bloomsbury group members saw as repressive
practices of sexual inequality, and in attempts to establish a new
social order based upon liberation from these established norms.
Love (an inner state) was held in higher esteem than monogamy (a
demonstrable behavior) , and several of the members had more than
one serious relationship simultaneously , and also cast aside
normative behaviors in regard to child care , in the spirit of what
came to be known as
polyfidelity later
in the 20th century . (Term attributed to Nicholas Albery, author
of "The Book of Social Inventions".)
Origins
The Bloomsbury Group came from mostly upper middle-class
professional families. E. M. Forster, Virginia Woolf and Vanessa
Bell had small independent incomes. Others such as Lytton Strachey,
Leonard Woolf, the MacCarthys, Duncan Grant, and Roger Fry needed
to work for their livings. Of these, only Clive Bell could be
called wealthy.
All the male members of the early Bloomsbury
Group except Duncan Grant were educated at the Cambridge colleges
of Trinity
or King’s
. At Trinity in 1899 Lytton Strachey, Leonard
Woolf, Saxon Sydney-Turner and Clive Bell became good friends with
Thoby Stephen, who introduced them to his sisters Vanessa and
Virginia in London, and in this way the Bloomsbury Group came into
being. All the Cambridge men except Clive Bell and the Stephen
brothers were also members of the secret undergraduate society
known as the
Apostles; there they
met older members such as Desmond MacCarthy and Roger Fry as well
as E. M. Forster and J. M. Keynes, who were all from King’s
College. Through the Apostles Bloomsbury also encountered the
analytic philosophers
G. E. Moore and
Bertrand Russell who were revolutionizing
British philosophy at the turn of the century. Moore’s
Principia Ethica (1903). Distinguishing between ethical
ends and means was a commonplace of ethics, but what made
Principia Ethica so important for Bloomsbury was Moore’s
conception of intrinsic worth as distinct from instrumental value.
As with the distinction between love (an intrinsic state) and
monogamy (a behavior), Moores' differentiation of intrinsic and
instrumental value allowed the Bloomsbury's to maintain a ethical
high-ground based on intrinsic merit, independent or without
reference what were normatively seen as consequences. For Moore,
intrinsic value depended on an indeterminable intuition of good and
a concept of complex states of mind whose worth as a whole was not
proportionate to the sum of its parts. For both Moore and
Bloomsbury, the greatest ethics goods were were ideals of personal
relations and aesthetic appreciation . But more important than
these for the group’s values was the recurrent questioning of human
behaviour in terms of instrumental means and intrinsic ends .
Old Bloomsbury
When they came down from college, the men of Cambridge began to
meet the women of Bloomsbury through the Stephen family. Thoby’s
premature death in 1906 brought them more firmly together. Lytton
Strachey became a close friend of the Stephen sisters as did Duncan
Grant through his affairs with Lytton Strachey, Maynard Keynes, and
Adrian Stephen. Clive Bell married Vanessa in 1907, and Leonard
Woolf returned from the Ceylon Civil Service to marry Virginia in
1912. Cambridge Apostle friendships brought into the group Desmond
MacCarthy, his wife Molly, and E. M. Forster. Except for Forster,
who published three novels before the highly successful
Howards
End in 1910, the group were late developers. It was also in
1910 that Roger Fry joined the group. His notorious
post-impressionist exhibitions of 1910
and 1912 involved Bloomsbury in a second revolution following on
the Cambridge philosophical one. This time the Bloomsbury painters
were much involved and influenced. Bloomsbury was also part of
Fry’s extension of post-impressionism into the decorative arts with
his
Omega Workshops, which lasted
until 1920.
Bloomsbury artists rejected the traditional
distinction between fine and decorative art, as can be seen at
Charleston
Farmhouse
near Lewes in Sussex where Vanessa Bell, her
children and Duncan Grant moved in 1916 for the rest of their
lives. (Charleston is now open to visitors, as is Monk's
House, the Rodmell cottage the Woolfs moved to in 1919, now owned
by the
National Trust.)
The establishment’s hostility to post-impressionism made Bloomsbury
controversial, and controversial they have remained. Clive Bell
polemicized post-impressionism in his widely read book
Art
(1914), basing his aesthetics partly on Roger Fry’s art criticism
and G. E. Moore’s moral philosophy. The campaign for women’s
suffrage added to the controversial nature of Bloomsbury, as
Virginia Woolf and some but not all members of the group perceived
the connections between the politics of capitalism, imperialism,
gender and aesthetics.
Old Bloomsbury’s development was shattered along with just about
everything else in modernist culture by the
First World War. None of the men fought in
the war. Most but not all of them were conscientious objectors,
which of course added to the group’s controversies. Politically the
members of Bloomsbury were divided between liberalism and
socialism, as can be seen in the respective careers and writings of
Maynard Keynes and Leonard Woolf. But they were united in their
opposition to the government that involved them in the war and then
in an impermanent peace.
Though the war dispersed Old Bloomsbury, the individuals continued
to develop their careers. E. M. Forster followed his successful
novels with
Maurice which he could not publish because it
treated homosexuality untragically. In 1915 Virginia Woolf brought
out her first novel,
The Voyage Out. And in 1917 the
Woolfs founded their
Hogarth Press,
which would publish
T. S. Eliot,
Katherine Mansfield, and many others
including Virginia herself along with the standard English
translations of
Freud. Then in 1918 Lytton
Strachey published his critique of
Victorianism in the shape of four ironic
biographies in
Eminent
Victorians, which added to the arguments around Bloomsbury
that continue to this day. The immediate impact of Strachey’s art
on Bloomsbury’s books appeared in J. M. Keynes’s influential attack
the next year on the
Versailles
Peace Treaty.
Later Bloomsbury
In March 1920 Molly MacCarthy began a club to help Desmond and
herself write their memoirs and also to bring the members of Old
Bloomsbury back together. The comedy of a group of friends in their
forties reading one another their memoirs was not lost on
Bloomsbury. Many of the ensuing memoirs, such as Virginia Woolf on
her Hyde Park Gate home and Maynard Keynes on his early beliefs,
are ironic in ways not always recognized by later commentators. The
Memoir Club testifies to the continuing cohesion of Bloomsbury. For
the next thirty years they came together in irregular meetings to
write about the memories they shared in growing up together, at
college, and later in Bloomsbury. The members of The Memoir Club
were not quite equivalent to those of Old Bloomsbury, however; the
club did not include Adrian Stephen, for example, or Sydney-Turner,
who certainly belonged to Old Bloomsbury. Yet all but one of the
other members belonged to Old Bloomsbury, and indeed Old Bloomsbury
itself became a popular subject for the Club’s memoirs.
The 1920s were in a number of ways the blooming of Bloomsbury.
Virginia Woolf was writing and publishing her most widely-read
modernist novels and essays, E. M. Forster completed
A Passage to India which remains the
most highly regarded novel on English imperialism in India. Forster
wrote no more novels but he became one of England’s most
influential essayists. Duncan Grant then Vanessa Bell had
single-artist exhibitions. Lytton Strachey wrote his biographies of
two Queens, Victoria then Elizabeth (and Essex). Desmond MacCarthy
and Leonard Woolf engaged in friendly rivalry as literary editors,
respectively of the
New
Statesman and the
Nation and Athenaeum, thus
fuelling animosities that saw Bloomsbury dominating the cultural
scene. Roger Fry wrote and lectured widely on art, while Clive Bell
applied Bloomsbury values to his book
Civilization (1928),
which Leonard Woolf saw as limited and elitist. Leonard, who had
helped formulate proposals for the League of Nations during the
war, offered his own views on the subject in
Imperialism and
Civilization (1928). In many respects throughout its history
Bloomsbury’s most incisive critics came from within.
In the darkening 1930s Bloomsbury began to die. A year after
publishing a collection of brief lives,
Portraits in
Miniature (1931), Lytton Strachey died; shortly afterwards
Carrington shot herself. Roger Fry, who had become England’s
greatest art critic, died in 1934. Vanessa and Clive’s eldest son,
Julian Bell, was killed in 1937 while
driving an ambulance in the
Spanish
Civil War. Virginia Woolf wrote Fry’s biography but with the
coming of war again her mental instability recurred, and she
drowned herself in 1941. In the previous decade she had become one
of the century’s most famous feminist writer with three more
novels, and a series of essays including the moving late memoir
“Sketch of the Past”, It was also in the Thirties that Desmond
MacCarthy became perhaps the most widely read – and heard -
literary critic with his columns in
The Sunday Times and his broadcasts
with the BBC. John Maynard Keynes’s
The
General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money (1936)
made him the century’s most influential economist. He died in 1946
after being much involved in monetary negotiations with the United
States.
The diversity yet collectivity of Later Bloomsbury’s ideas and
achievements can be summed up in a series of credos that were done
in 1938, the year of Munich. Virginia Woolf published her radical
feminist polemic
Three Guineas that shocked some of her
fellow members including Keynes who had enjoyed the gentler
A
Room of One’s Own (1929). Keynes read his famous but decidedly
more conservative memoir
My Early Beliefs to The Memoir
Club. Clive Bell published an appeasement pamphlet (he later
supported the war), and E. M. Forster wrote an early version of his
famous essay “What I Believe” with its choice, still shocking for
some, of personal relations over patriotism.
Posthumous Bloomsbury
The Memoir Club continued meeting intermittently until Clive Bell’s
death in 1964. Younger members of the group and the club included
the writer
David Garnett, and later
his wife
Angelica Garnett, the
daughter of Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant. Her half-brother the
artist and writer Quentin Bell eventually became the club’s
secretary, and later wrote his aunt’s biography. Sister and brother
wrote very different memoirs about Bloomsbury, Angelica’s being
Deceived by Kindness (1984) and Quentin’s
Elders and
Betters (1995). Among other younger members were Lytton’s
niece the writer
Julia Strachey, and
the diarist
Frances Partridge who
had married into Lytton Strachey’s ménage in the thirties.
Following Virginia’s death Leonard Woolf began editing collections
of her writings including a selection from her diaries,
A
Writer’s Diary (1953), which revealed publicly for the first
time what the Bloomsbury Group had been like. Leonard’s own volumes
of autobiography in the 1960s (he died in 1969) gave the fullest
account, but he remained reticent about the sexual lives of the
members, as had the excerpts from Virginia’s diary. Subsequent
biographies of Strachey then Virginia Woolf, Forster, Keynes, Fry,
Vanessa Bell, and Grant removed all veils. Indeed much of the
interest in Bloomsbury has been biographically driven, yet it is
their achievements as writers, artists, and thinkers that have
ultimately made their lives biographically interesting. The case of
Virginia Woolf provides an example. There have now been more than
half a dozen biographies of her, yet a good deal of the basic
scholarship of locating and editing her work remains unfinished;
significant unpublished writings of hers are still being found in
library archives.
And of course controversy continues to accompany Bloomsbury
wherever it goes. Much work on Bloomsbury continues to focus on the
group’s class origins & (supposed) elitism, their satire, their
atheism, their oppositional politics and liberal economics, their
non-abstract art, their modernist fiction, their art and literary
criticism, and their non-nuclear family and sexual
arrangements.
The Bloomsbury Group has featured in many works of fiction,
including, notably,
Michael
Cunningham's
The
Hours and
Susan Sellers'
Vanessa and Virginia.
See also
References
- Bell, Quentin, Bloomsbury (new edition, 1986).
- Edel, Leon, Bloomsbury : a house of lions.
Philadelphia : Lippincott, c1979
- Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004).
- Reed, Christopher, Bloomsbury Rooms (2004).
- Rosenbaum, S. P (ed), A Bloomsbury Group Reader
(1993).
- Rosenbaum, S. P (ed), The Bloomsbury Group: A Collection of
Memoirs and Commentary (revised edition, 1995).
- Shone, Richard, Bloomsbury Portraits (1976).
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