Bloomsbury Group

The Bloomsbury Group or Bloomsbury Set or just "Bloomsbury", as its adherents ("members" is probably too formal a designation) would generally refer to it, was an English group of artists and scholars that existed from around 1905 until around World War II.

Themes

Although mainly known as a literary group (with Virginia Woolf as its most widely known exponent), its adherents were active in several fields of art, art criticism and scholarship:

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• Literature (but also: art criticism, biographical essays, social studies, etc.) was the main realm of Virginia Woolf, E. M. Forster, Lytton Strachey, Clive Bell, William Plomer and Laurens van der Post.
• Plastic arts were (amongst others) represented by the painters Vanessa Bell (who had married Clive Bell in 1907), Duncan Grant and Dora Carrington, and by Roger Fry (who also got name as art critic and theorist). By the end of World War I, Charleston, where Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant lived most of their time, had, in a way, developed to the plastic artists' focus point within the Bloomsbury movement.
• The economist John Maynard Keynes and Virginia Woolf's husband Leonard Woolf mainly published non-fiction in their fields of expertise, while Desmond MacCarthy was known as a critic.
• A musician was part of the group: Saxon Sydney-Turner.

The performing arts were certainly underrepresented in the group, as if not compatible with the group's main pursuits: e.g., John Maynard Keynes's wife Lydia Lopokova, who had once been a principal dancer in the Ballets Russes, was considered a complete outsider by most of the group's adherents; also, by the time Angelica Garnett, Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant's daughter, decided for a stage career the link with Bloomsbury was somehow out of the picture.

Related Topics:
Lydia Lopokova - Ballets Russes - Angelica Garnett

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There was a large overlap between Bloomsbury and the people contributing to and supporting the (more formally organised) Omega Workshops, initiated by Roger Fry a few years after he entered the Bloomsbury Group in 1910: e.g. Nina Hamnett belonged to both. Bloomsbury also had strong connections with Rupert Brooke and his Neo-Pagans - the wood engraver Gwen Darwin and her French painter husband, Jacques Raverat were part of both; Gwen's sister was married to Maynard Keynes's brother Geoffrey, whose enthusiasm for William Blake led to Gwen designing a ballet based on his etchings of Job which was composed by her Wedgwood cousin, Ralph Vaughan Williams.

Related Topics:
Omega Workshops - Nina Hamnett - Rupert Brooke - Neo-Pagans - Gwen Darwin - Jacques Raverat - Maynard Keynes - William Blake - Ralph Vaughan Williams

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Bloomsbury remained a tight-knit and highly exclusive group, also referred to as the Bloomsberries. The members strongly rejected the Victorian and Edwardian eras' strictures on religious, artistic, social, and sexual issues, although, as amongst others Angelica Garnett argues in her autobiographical book Deceived by Kindness (ISBN 0-7126-6266-9), they never came completely free from these. The Bloomsbury Set could certainly be considered as a clique, including acquaintances, such as Lady Ottoline Morrell, whose estate in Garsington undoubtedly became another Bloomsbury centre, where the Bloomsberries mingled with other artists and intellectuals of their day.

Related Topics:
Victorian - Edwardian - Clique - Ottoline Morrell - Garsington

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Another trait characteristic of Bloomsbury was (uncommon in the England of their days) the love of southern Europe, mostly concentrated on Italy and France, but also Greece.

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The group certainly acted as a kind of safe haven for many of its gay, lesbian and/or bisexual members: also, almost as a rule, Bloomsberries had relations with more than one partner, mostly with partners of both sexes.

Related Topics:
Gay - Lesbian - Bisexual

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By the end of the Second World War a number of the group's residences in the Bloomsbury area had been shelled, and Virginia Woolf had committed suicide. The high days of the group were over, although in places like Charleston the Bloomsbury way of life still continued for several decades.

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