Bloomsbury Group

Group of friends who met regularly at 46 Gordon Square, Bloomsbury, London, the home of Vanessa Bell and Virginia Woolf. Members of the group were John Maynard Keynes, E.M. Forster and Roger Fry.

The Bloomsbury Group emerged between 1905 and 1906. During that time a mixed group of writers, artists and critics started to meet regularly at 46 Gordon Square in Bloomsbury, a part of London. The house was the home of the sisters Virginia and Vanessa Stephen, who were still unmarried and moved there after their father had died. The Bloomsbury Group can be considered an informal association, which was connected by friendship and mutual interests in art, politics, literature and philosophy. Moreover they are said to have discussed more indecent topics at that time, like sex, open marriage and homosexuality. The exact number of members remains obscure, some consider the group to be existing of only nine people, which Leon Edels calls “originals”. For him, these originals were: Maynard Keynes, Leonard Woolf, Virginia Woolf, Lytton Strachey, Clive Bell, Desmond MacCarthy, Roger Fry, Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant. He does not deny that there were other more silent members but he questions the real membership of other artists and writers, for example that of E.M Forster. There is furthermore no real answer or consensus to the question, what Bloomsbury and the group really was. The group itself kept denying the fact that they indeed were one and there are many questions that are still open, like: Was the group Victorian or modern? Conventional or groundbreaking? But they definitely stood out for changes in society and revolted “against the artistic, social and sexual restrictions of Victorian society” (Drabble, 113). Some facts nevertheless can be considered as true: The group did not only discuss specific topics, but general moral and political matters. Furthermore, the group was influenced by the attitudes of G. E. Moore, who in his Principia Ethica wrote of “‘pleasures of human intercourse and the enjoyment of beautiful objects’” (Drabble, 112). On the other hand the Bloomsbury group can be regarded as of importance for the emergence of the avantgarde in art and literature in Britain. They objected war and stood up for peace. The association was criticized for being combined of only elitist and privileged members, who were “preoccupied with neurotic personal relations” (Edel, 11). Others are less critical towards them and argue that the group not only criticized the prevailing conditions in society and politics but they also made an effort to improve them. The most prosperous time for the Bloomsbury group seems to have been in the 1920s, but a revival was recorded in the late 1960s.

Sources:

Czarnecki, Kristin: Comparative Modernism: The Bloomsbury Group and the Harlem Renaissance. in: Potts, Gina/ Lisa Shahriari (ed.): Virginia Woolf's Bloomsbury, Volume 1. Aesthetic Theory and Literary Practice. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.

Drabble, Margaret (ed.), Oxford Companion to English Literature, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985.

Edel, Leon: Bloomsbury. A house of Lions. London: The Hogarth Press, 1979.