Although popularly thought of as a formal group, it was a loose collective of friends and relatives closely associated with the University of Cambridge for the men and King's College London for the women, who at one point lived, worked or studied together near Bloomsbury, London. 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."[3] The historian C. J. Coventry, resurrecting an older argument by Raymond Williams, disputes the existence of the group and the extent of its impact, describing it as "curio" for those interested in Keynes and Woolf.[4][5]
In 1905 Vanessa began the "Friday Club" and Thoby ran "Thursday Evenings", which became the basis for the Bloomsbury Group,[8] which to some was really "Cambridge in London".[6] Thoby's premature death in 1906 brought them more firmly together[7] and they became what is now known as the "Old Bloomsbury" group who met in earnest beginning in 1912. In the 1920s and 1930s the group shifted when the original members died and the next generation had reached adulthood.[9]
The Bloomsbury Group, mostly from upper middle-class professional families, formed part of "an intellectual aristocracy which could trace itself back to the Clapham Sect".[6] It was an informal network[10][11] of an influential group of artists, art critics, writers and an economist, many of whom lived in the West Central 1 district of London known as Bloomsbury.[12] They were "spiritually" similar to the Clapham group who supported its members' careers: "The Bloomsberries promoted one another's work and careers just as the original Claphamites did, as well as the intervening generations of their grandparents and parents."[13]
A historical feature of these friends and relations is that their close relationships all pre-dated their fame as writers, artists, and thinkers.[14]
There were stable marriages and varied and complicated affairs among the individual members.[13] Lytton Strachey[nb 1] and his cousin and lover Duncan Grant[18] became close friends of the Stephen sisters, Vanessa Bell and Virginia Woolf. Duncan Grant had affairs with siblings Vanessa Bell and Adrian Stephen, as well as David Garnett, Maynard Keynes, and James Strachey. 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.[7]
The group met not only in their homes in Bloomsbury, central London, but also at countryside retreats. There are two significant ones near Lewes in Sussex: Charleston Farmhouse,[nb 2] where Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant moved in 1916, and Monk's House (now owned by the National Trust),[nb 3] in Rodmell, owned by Virginia and Leonard Woolf from 1919.[19]
Others
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".[20]
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, reflecting in large part the influence of G. E. Moore: "the essence of what Bloomsbury drew from Moore is contained in his statement that 'one's prime objects in life were love, the creation and enjoyment of aesthetic experience and the pursuit of knowledge'".[6]
Philosophy and ethics
Through the Apostles they also encountered the analytic philosophers G. E. Moore and Bertrand Russell who were revolutionizing British philosophy at the start of the 20th century. Distinguishing between ends and means was a commonplace of ethics, but what made Moore's Principia Ethica (1903) so important for the philosophical basis of Bloomsbury thought 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, i.e. instrumental), Moore's differentiation between intrinsic and instrumental value allowed the Bloomsburies to maintain an ethical high-ground based on intrinsic merit, independent of, and without reference to, the consequences of their actions. 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 ethic goods were "the importance of personal relationships and the private life", as well as aesthetic appreciation: "art for art's sake".[22]
Bloomsbury reacted against current upper class English social rituals, "the bourgeois habits... the conventions of Victorian life"[23] with their emphasis on public achievement, in favour of a more informal and private focus on personal relationships and individual pleasure. E. M. Forster for example approved of "the decay of smartness and fashion as factors, and the growth of the idea of enjoyment",[24] and asserted that "if I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country".[25]
The Group "believed in pleasure... They tried to get the maximum of pleasure out of their personal relations. If this meant triangles or more complicated geometric figures, well then, one accepted that too".[26] Yet at the same time, they shared a sophisticated, civilized, and highly articulated ideal of pleasure. As Virginia Woolf put it, their "triumph is in having worked out a view of life which was not by any means corrupt or sinister or merely intellectual; rather ascetic and austere indeed; which still holds, and keeps them dining together, and staying together, after 20 years".[27]
Politics
Politically, Bloomsbury held mainly left-liberal stances (opposed to militarism, for example); but its "clubs and meetings were not activist, like the political organisations to which many of Bloomsbury's members also belonged", and they would be criticised for that by their 1930s successors, who by contrast were "heavily touched by the politics which Bloomsbury had rejected".[28]
The campaign for women's suffrage added to the controversial nature of Bloomsbury, as Virginia Woolf represented the group in the fictional The Years and Night and Day works about the suffrage movement.[29]
Roger Fry joined the group in 1910. His 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.[17][nb 4] Fry and other Bloomsbury artists rejected the traditional distinction between fine and decorative art.[30][nb 1]
These "Bloomsbury assumptions" are reflected in members' criticisms of materialistic realism in painting and fiction, influenced above all by Clive Bell's "concept of 'Significant Form', which separated and elevated the concept of form above content in works of art":[31] it has been suggested that, with their "focus on form...Bell's ideas have come to stand in for, perhaps too much so, the aesthetic principles of the Bloomsbury Group".[32]
The establishment's hostility to post-impressionism made Bloomsbury controversial, and controversial they have remained. Clive Bell polemicized[clarification needed] 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; and as the war came he argued that "in these days of storm and darkness, it seemed right that at the shrine of civilization - in Bloomsbury, I mean - the lamp should be tended assiduously".[33]
World War I
Nina Hamnett painted by Roger Fry, 1917, in a dress designed by Vanessa Bell and made at the Omega Workshops. The shoes may also be from Omega and the cushion on the chair is covered with 'Maud' linen, also by Bell.
Old Bloomsbury's development was affected, along with much of modernist culture, by the First World War: "the small world of Bloomsbury was later said by some on its outskirts to have been irretrievably shattered", though in fact its friendships "survived the upheavals and dislocations of war, in many ways were even strengthened by them".[34] Most but not all of them were conscientious objectors. Politically, the members of Bloomsbury had liberal and socialist leanings.[35]
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 about Bloomsbury that continue to this day, and "brought him the triumph he had always longed for... The book was a sensation".[36]
Bloomsbury members became known for distinctive garments; Woolf in particular was opposed to conventions surrounding formal attire, such as "dressing for dinner".[38]
Later Bloomsbury
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, and E. M. Forster completed A Passage to India, a highly regarded novel on British imperialism in India. Forster wrote no more novels but he became one of England's most influential essayists. Duncan Grant, and then Vanessa Bell, had single-artist exhibitions. Lytton Strachey wrote his biographies of two queens, Queen Victoria (1921) and Elizabeth and Essex: A Tragic History (1928). 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; meanwhile, Clive Bell applied Bloomsbury values to his book Civilization (1928), which Leonard Woolf saw as limited and elitist, describing Bell as a "wonderful organiser of intellectual greyhound racing tracks".[39]
In the darkening 1930s, Bloomsbury began to die: "Bloomsbury itself was hardly any longer a focus".[40] A year after publishing a collection of brief lives, Portraits in Miniature (1931),[41] Lytton Strachey died;[42] shortly afterwards Carrington shot herself. Roger Fry died in 1934.[42] Vanessa and Clive's eldest son, Julian Bell, was killed in 1937 during the Spanish Civil War.[8] Virginia Woolf wrote Fry's biography, but with the coming of war again her mental instability recurred, and she drowned herself in 1941.[42] In the previous decade she had become one of the century's most famous feminist writers with three more novels, and a series of essays including the moving late memoir "A Sketch of the Past". It was also in the 1930s that Desmond MacCarthy became perhaps the most widely read—and heard—literary critic with his columns in The Sunday Times and his broadcasts for the BBC. John Maynard Keynes's The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money (1936) made him one of the century's most influential economists. He died in 1946 after being much involved in monetary negotiations with the United States.[citation needed]
The diversity yet collectivity of Later Bloomsbury's ideas and achievements can be summed up in a series of credos that were made in 1938, the year of the Munich Agreement. 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 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 of personal relations over patriotism: his quiet assertion in the face of the increasingly totalitarian claims of both left and right that "personal relations... love and loyalty to an individual can run counter to the claims of the State".[43]
Memoir Club
This section needs expansion. You can help by adding to it. (May 2023)
In March 1920 Molly MacCarthy began the Memoir Club to help Desmond and herself write their memoirs; and also "for their friends to regroup after the war (with the proviso that they should always tell the truth)".[44] It met until 1956[45] or 1964.[46] The club was made up of members of the Bloomsbury Group, a loose collective of artists, writers, intellectuals, and philosophers. Some of the core members of the Bloomsbury Group included Virginia Woolf, Leonard Woolf, Vanessa Bell, Clive Bell, John Maynard Keynes, Roger Fry, E.M. Forster, Lytton Strachey, Sir Desmond MacCarthy, and Duncan Grant. [47]
Criticism
Early complaints focused on a perceived cliquiness: "on personal mannerisms—the favourite phrases ('ex-quisitely civilized', and 'How simply too extraordinary!'), the incredulous, weirdly emphasised Strachey voice".[48] After World War I, as the members of the Group "began to be famous, the execration increased, and the caricature of an idle, snobbish and self-congratulatory rentier class, promoting its own brand of high culture began to take shape":[33] as Forster self-mockingly put it, "In came the nice fat dividends, up rose the lofty thoughts".[49]
The growing threats of the 1930s brought new criticism from younger writers of "what the last lot had done (Bloomsbury, Modernism, Eliot) in favour of what they thought of as urgent hard-hitting realism"; while "Wyndham Lewis's The Apes of God, which called Bloomsbury élitist, corrupt and talentless, caused a stir"[50] of its own. The most telling criticism, however, came perhaps from within the Group's own ranks, when on the eve of war Keynes gave a "nostalgic and disillusioned account of the pure sweet air of G. E. Moore, that belief in undisturbed individualism, that Utopianism based on a belief in human reasonableness and decency, that refusal to accept the idea of civilisation as 'a thin and precarious crust'... Keynes's fond, elegiac repudiation of his "early beliefs", in the light of current affairs ("We completely misunderstood human nature, including our own")".[51]
In his book on the background of the Cambridge spies, Andrew Sinclair wrote about the Bloomsbury group: "rarely in the field of human endeavour has so much been written about so few who achieved so little".[52] American philosopher Martha Nussbaum was quoted in 1999 as saying "I don't like anything that sets itself up as an in-group or an elite, whether it is the Bloomsbury group or Derrida".[53]
Raymond Williams saw Bloomsbury as the invention of an ageing and lonely Leonard Woolf, seeking to lift himself and his friends from obscurity. To Williams, the only two so-called "members" of any significance in their respective fields were Keynes and Virginia Woolf.[5] Williams unfavourably compared the Bloomsbury Group to the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and Arts and Crafts movement, finding that the older groups were more radical and consequential.
↑ Bloomsbury was also part of Fry's extension of post-impressionism into the decorative arts with his Omega Workshops, which lasted until 1920.[17]
Related Research Articles
Adeline Virginia Woolf was an English writer. She is considered one of the most important modernist 20th-century authors. She pioneered the use of stream of consciousness as a narrative device.
Giles Lytton Strachey was an English writer and critic. A founding member of the Bloomsbury Group and author of Eminent Victorians, he established a new form of biography in which psychological insight and sympathy are combined with irreverence and wit. His biography Queen Victoria (1921) was awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize.
Duncan James Corrowr Grant was a Scottish painter and designer of textiles, pottery, theatre sets, and costumes. He was a member of the Bloomsbury Group.
Vanessa Bell was an English painter and interior designer, a member of the Bloomsbury Group and the sister of Virginia Woolf.
Arthur Clive Heward Bell was an English art critic, associated with formalism and the Bloomsbury Group. He developed the art theory known as significant form.
Gordon Square is a public park square in Bloomsbury, London, England. It is part of the Bedford Estate and was designed as one of a pair with the nearby Tavistock Square. It is owned by the University of London.
Lydia Lopokova, Baroness Keynes was a Russian ballerina famous during the early 20th century.
Jacques Pierre Paul Raverat was a French painter; Raverat was the son of Georges Pierre Raverat and Helena Lorena Raverat, née Caron; he was born in Paris, France, in 1885.
Edward Hilton Young, 1st Baron Kennet, was a British politician and writer.
Charleston, in East Sussex, is a property associated with the Bloomsbury group, that is open to the public. It was the country home of Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant and is an example of their decorative style within a domestic context, representing the fruition of more than sixty years of artistic creativity. In addition to the house and artists' garden, Charleston hosts a year-round programme of Bloomsbury and contemporary exhibitions in a suite of galleries designed by Jamie Fobert Architects which opened in September 2018. Two restored barns are home to The Threshing Barn café and The Hay Barn where events and workshops are held throughout the year. The Outer Studio at Charleston hosts a permanent display of Bell and Grant's Famous Women Dinner Service, and there is also a shop selling Bloomsbury-inspired art, homeware fabrics, fashion, books and stationery.
Angelica Vanessa Garnett, was a British writer, painter and artist. She was the author of the memoir Deceived with Kindness (1984), an account of her experience growing up at the heart of the Bloomsbury Group.
Monk's House is a 16th-century weatherboarded cottage in the village of Rodmell, three miles (4.8 km) south of Lewes, East Sussex, England. The writer Virginia Woolf and her husband, the political activist, journalist and editor Leonard Woolf, bought the house by auction at the White Hart Hotel, Lewes, on 1 July 1919 for 700 pounds, and received there many visitors connected to the Bloomsbury Group, including T. S. Eliot, E. M. Forster, Roger Fry and Lytton Strachey. The purchase is described in detail in her Diary, vol. 1, pp. 286–8.
Adrian Leslie Stephen was a member of the Bloomsbury Group, an author and psychoanalyst, and the younger brother of Thoby Stephen, Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell. He and his wife, Karin, became interested in the work of Sigmund Freud, and were among the first British psychoanalysts.
Julian Thoby Stephen, known as the Goth, was the brother of Vanessa Bell and Virginia Woolf, both prominent members of the Bloomsbury Group, and of Adrian Stephen.
Saxon Arnoll Sydney-Turner was a member of the Bloomsbury Group who worked as a British civil servant throughout his life.
The Bloomsbury Group plays a prominent role in the LGBT history of its day.
Life in Squares is a British television mini-series that was broadcast on BBC Two from 27 July to 10 August 2015. The title comes from Dorothy Parker's witticism that the Bloomsbury Group, whose lives it portrays, had "lived in squares, painted in circles and loved in triangles".
Mary Barnes Hutchinson was a British short-story writer, socialite, model and a member of the Bloomsbury Group.
Katherine Laird "Ka" Cox, the daughter of a British socialist stockbroker and his wife, was a Fabian and graduate of Cambridge University. There, she met Rupert Brooke, becoming his lover, and was a member of his Neo-Pagans. She was also a friend of Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group. During World War I she worked with the Serbian Relief Fund, assisting refugees in Corsica. After the war, she married the Labour politician Will Arnold-Forster, and became the first woman magistrate in Cornwall. She and her husband were instrumental in founding Gordonstoun School in Scotland in 1934. Her sudden death at the age of 51 fuelled speculation of involvement in the occult.
1 2 Raymond Williams, “The Significance of ‘Bloomsbury’ as a Social and Cultural Group,” in Derek Crabtree & A. P. Thirlwall, Keynes and the Bloomsbury Group: The Fourth Keynes Seminar held at the University of Kent at Canterbury (Macmillan, 1980).
↑ Andrew Sinclair, The Red and the Blue. Intelligence, Treason and the Universities (Coronet Books, Hodder and Stoughten, U.K. 1987) ISBN0-340-41687-4. page 33
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
