Edit] Membership

Bloomsbury Group

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This article is about the historic literary group. For the contemporary publishing company, see Bloomsbury Publishing.

The Bloomsbury Group — or Bloomsbury Set — was an enormously influential group of associated English writers, intellectuals, philosophers and artists,^[1] the best known members of which included Virginia Woolf, John Maynard Keynes, E. M. Forster and Lytton Strachey. This loose collective of friends and relatives lived, worked or studied together near Bloomsbury, London, during the first half of the 20th century. According to Ian Ousby, "although its members denied being a group in any formal sense, they were united by an abiding belief in the importance of the arts".^[2] Their works and outlook deeply influenced literature, aesthetics, criticism, and economics as well as modern attitudes towards feminism, pacifism, and sexuality.^[3]

Detailed overview of the better and lesser known members of the Bloomsbury Group.

Contents [hide]

• 1 Membership
• 1.1 Shared ideas
• 2 Origins
• 3 Old Bloomsbury
• 4 Later Bloomsbury
• 5 Posthumous Bloomsbury
• 6 Criticism
• 7 See also
• 8 References
• 9 Further reading
• 10 Photograph Albums
• 11 External links

edit] Membership

Much about Bloomsbury appears to be controversial, including its membership and name: indeed, some would maintain that "the three words 'the Bloomsbury group' have been so much used as to have become almost unusable".^[4] The group did not hold formal or informal discussions on particular topics, but talked about a range of topics at all times. Identifications of the membership of the circle have varied considerably depending on who drew up the lists, and when.

"Leonard Woolf, in the 1960s, listed as 'Old Bloomsbury' Vanessa and Clive Bell, Virginia and Leonard Woolf, Adrian and Karin Stephen, Lytton Strachey, Maynard Keynes, Duncan Grant, E. M. Forster, Saxon Sydney-Turner, Roger Fry, Desmond and Molly MacCarthy, with Julian, Quentin and Angelica Bell, and David Garnett as later additions".^[5] However, the claim has been made that (though factually accurate) Woolf's formulation is "a little too dogmatic and definite and contributes to the false view that Bloomsbury was an entity, almost a formal body", as opposed to "an informal group of friends, and nothing more".^[6]

Vanessa Bell and Virginia Woolf were sisters, and their brothers, the older Thoby and the younger Adrian, can also be considered original members of the group, (as were some other Cambridge figures - indeed, to some, "Bloomsbury was really Cambridge in London").^[7] Lytton Strachey and Duncan Grant – later Vanessa’s partner – were cousins, so that a web of kinship, intellectual, social, sexual and amicable ties bound the group, while throughout the group’s history there were various (and complicated!) affairs among the individual members, most of whom lived for considerable periods of time in the West Central 1 district of London known as Bloomsbury.

An 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: Keynes’s wife Lydia Lopokova was only reluctantly accepted into the group,^[8] and there were certainly "writers who were at some time close friends of Virginia Woolf, but who were distinctly not 'Bloomsbury': T. S. Eliot, Katherine Mansfield, Hugh Walpole".^[9] Members cited in "other lists might include Ottoline Morrell, or Dora Carrington, or James and Alix Strachey";^[10] but even such a close associate as Virginia Woolf's long term lover Vita Sackville-West - "Vita would be the Hogarth Press's best-selling author"^[11] - belonged to a different literary grouping.

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