Bloomsbury Group

Not really an organised "group" group, but a circle of friends who met regularly at 46 Gordon Square, Bloomsbury, London, the home of Thoby, Vanessa and Virginia Stephens.

Between 1905 and 1906 a mixed group of writers, artists and critics started to meet regularly at 46 Gordon Square in Bloomsbury. The house was the home of Thoby, Virginia and Vanessa Stephen, who had moved there after their father had died. They were visited by friends and talked about art, politics, sex and literature. The exact number of members remains obscure, some consider the group to be consisting of only nine people, which Leon Edels calls “originals”. For him, these originals were: John 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 to 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 (eds.): Virginia Woolf's Bloomsbury, Volume 1. Aesthetic Theory and Literary Practice. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. 135-152.

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.