What is the Bloomsbury Group?

Defining the Bloomsbury Group

The Bloomsbury Group was a loose network of writers, artists, and intellectuals who regularly met, lived, and worked together in and around central London’s leafy Bloomsbury district during the early twentieth century. The group is sometimes simply referred to as Bloomsbury, with individual members referred to as “Bloomsberries” (Helt and Detloff, Queer Bloomsbury, 2016) or “Bloomsburyites” (Childs, Modernist Literature, 2011). These terms operate as a shorthand for a bohemian, experimental artistic energy that forged new ways of being and being together. These creative forces can be seen across the Bloomsbury Group’s art, writing, and the rhythms of their everyday lives. Rejecting the overhanging structures and traditions of the Victorian era, the group emerged alongside British modernism and the avant-garde, with its members responding to the turbulence of modernity and navigating questions of how art, truth and ethics operated.

Questions of who, where, and when 

Recent scholarship has explored the trouble with straightforward definitions concerning a network that was, as Andrzej Gasiorek writes, “not a monolithic entity but a group of disparate individuals” (A History of Modernist Literature, 2015). Indeed, tracing Bloomsbury’s boundaries becomes even more complicated, as some Bloomsberries themselves resisted the idea of a unified “group”: when questioned about the circle, for example, prominent member Vanessa Bell “implied that it was quite unimportant and that there never was such a thing as the ‘Bloomsbury Group’” (Selected Letters, 1993). Yet, as Derek Ryan and Stephen Ross discuss, the evasion seen in Bloomsbury’s correspondence 

So, what, where, and who was Bloomsbury? Brenda Helt and Madelyn Detloff remind us that it was an “urban geographical location as well as a signifier for a group of people living, thinking, and creating together” (Queer Bloomsbury, 2016). Bloomsbury spanned multiple sites, and unfolded through decades of intimate — sometimes sexual, sometimes platonic — domestic dynamics. To understand the contours of the complex network, what follows is an overview of Bloomsbury’s origins, activities, outputs, and central ideas, which also maps some of its many members and associates. 

Origins 

The group began not in Bloomsbury, but at Cambridge University. Leonard Woolf, Lytton Strachey and John Maynard Keynes were all members of a secret society called the “Cambridge Apostles,” who were inspired by the philosophical works of G. E. Moore (Hanna, Key Concepts in Modernist Literature, 2008). The Apostles were particularly taken by Moore’s Principia Ethica and his meditations on the need to appreciate beauty and the power of friendship: 

Spurred by questions of how art and beauty intersect with ethics and truth, Leonard Woolf, Strachey and Maynard Keynes became close friends with Saxon Sydney-Turner, Clive Bell and brothers Thoby and Adrian Stephen at Cambridge’s Trinity College in 1899. The Stephen brothers introduced their friends to their sisters, Vanessa Stephen (later Bell) and Virginia Stephen (later Woolf). The encounters between the Apostles and the Stephen sisters, Ryan and Ross write, birthed “[t]he Bloomsbury of intimacy, irreverence, and innovation,” that would continue to blossom over the next two decades (2018).

Activities 

Following the death of their father in 1904, Vanessa, Virginia, Adrian and Thoby Stephen moved into 46 Gordon Square in Bloomsbury. It was this home that hosted Bloomsbury’s first regular meetings. These meetings were split into two separate sets: “Thursday Evenings” hosted conversation for writers and critics, and was set up by Thoby Stephen; and “The Friday Club” was angled at artists, and was started by Vanessa Bell. The Thursday meetings included Strachey, the art critic Clive Bell, Leonard Woolf, John Maynard Keynes, and the writer and publisher David “Bunny” Garnett; and “created a space for literary, philosophical, and often downright bawdy chat” (Ryan and Ross, 2018). Fridays regularly saw Duncan Grant, John Nash, Henry Lamb, Edward Wadsworth, and — after he was introduced in 1910 — the artist and critic Roger Fry. 

The Group first found its name in 1912, when Fry organized an art exhibition featuring many artists in Bloomsbury’s circle, including Vanessa Bell and Grant. This was the “Second Post-Impressionist Exhibition.” The first, “Manet and the Post-Impressionists” in 1910, was one of the components that prompted Virginia Woolf’s famous remark that “on or about December 1910 human character changed” (Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown, 1924 [2019]). Woolf continues: 

This demonstrates just how radically new these exhibitions were. For Woolf, it gestured towards an inscrutable ontological shift. For others in London, it was — as Peter Childs writes — a “shocking” and novel experience to see experimental artwork like that of Paul Cézanne, Vincent Van Gogh, Paul Gauguin, Henri Matisse, and Pablo Picasso (Modernist Literature, 2011). As Quentin Bell later reflected, Fry became the “best-hated man in the London art world,” such was the reaction to his experimental exhibition (Bloomsbury, 1986).

The group’s meetings moved as their members did. Living in different configurations in houses in Bloomsbury and, as the First World War scattered the group’s members, further afield in Richmond, and the Sussex countryside. These living arrangements often transgressed traditional ideas of cohabitation based around family units or marriage. For example, in 1911 Adrian and Virginia Stephen lived in 38 Brunswick Square with Leonard Woolf (Virginia would marry Leonard in 1912), as well as their friends Maynard Keynes and Grant (Ryan and Ross, 2018). Vanessa (following her marriage to Clive Bell and an affair with Fry) moved to Charleston Farm in the Sussex countryside with her lover Grant and her children, where many others would also visit and reside, including Clive Bell, Maynard Keynes, the Woolfs, Strachey, and Grant’s lover Garnett (Helt and Detloff, 2016). Ryan and Ross view these various moves as “a relocation of Bloomsbury” rather than “a break from it” (2018). Indeed, Vanessa Bell and the group decorated Charleston like a canvas, with its walls, furnishings, woodwork, furniture, and even a bathtub adorned with painted patterns, portraits and nudes. Although no longer in Bloomsbury, the lively salon culture continued. 

Hogarth Press 

Having taught themselves to type and print by hand, Virginia and Leonard Woolf began the Hogarth Press in 1917 in the drawing-room of their Richmond home (Bradshaw and Dettmar, A Companion to Modernist Literature and Culture, 2008). Their first publication was Two Stories (1917), which included illustrations by artist Dora Carrington and was hand-printed and bound to produce 134 copies. From these small beginnings, the Woolfs expanded Hogarth, where it would print 450 titles — including works by T. S. Eliot, E. M. Forster, Katherine Mansfield, and translations of Sigmund Freud — before Virginia’s suicide in 1941. Dust jackets for Virginia Woolf’s books were designed by Vanessa Bell, revealing yet another facet of Bloomsbury’s interwoven network of collaboration.

Central ideas 

Although views varied throughout the network, several shared attitudes can be seen throughout their works. Childs observes that the Bloomsbury Set was one of the forces that drove a “new aesthetic sensibility that showed a desire for change” (2011) — a key characteristic of British modernism. Central to this, as Jesse Wolfe has explored in Bloomsbury, Modernism and the Reinvention of Intimacy (2011), was a critical examination of Victorian values, like those of monogamy, marriage, heteronormativity, sexual selfhood, morality, the mind, and human development.

Artistic experimentation 

From the bold forms and colors in Vanessa Bell’s post-impressionist paintings, to the ethereal interwoven streams of consciousness in Virginia Woolf’s The Waves (1931), members of the Bloomsbury Group experimented with what art could do, what it could represent, and which emotions it could provoke. Formal experimentation was, then, crucial to Bloomsbury’s aesthetics. In 1914, Clive Bell posited his thoughts on how “significant form” is crucial to all meaningful artwork: 

Members of the Bloomsbury Group would experiment with various forms throughout their lives. For instance, Vanessa Bell’s paintings shift between figurative pieces like “The Tub” (1917) and total abstraction, as in “Abstract Painting” (1914). Grant’s experimental “Abstract Kinetic Collage Painting with Sound” (1914) is a 15-foot scroll painted and pasted with colorful rectangles, and was intended to be rolled past the viewer’s eyes in a camera-box, accompanied by sound and in motion, which challenges the fixity of the form. From painted scrolls to skirting boards; Fry’s Omega Workshops Ltd. was a design company that brought modernism into the home, with artists decorating furniture and fabrics. This radical play occurred in literature, too. Virginia Woolf referred to The Waves (1931) in her diaries not as a novel but, rather, as a “play-poem idea;” which saw the boundaries between mind, body and world become permeable and fluid: 

Politics 

As Gasiorek observes, although Bloomsbury’s approach to things could be disparate and varied, it is “nonetheless possible to identify a generally agreed Bloomsbury attitude to the First World War,” which he defines as an “aestheticist pacifism” (2015). Grant and his lover Barnett, for example, became farm laborers in order to avoid fighting during WWI, and were eventually recognized as conscientious objectors (“Lifestyle and Legacy of the Bloomsbury Group”). Jonathan Atkin has explored the principles of Bloomsbury’s pacifism in A War of Individuals (2002), which sets out their opposition as “grounded upon moral, humanistic or aesthetic precepts.” Bloomsbury negotiated the impact of the war through their art, such as Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (1925) with its depiction of Septimus’s shell-shock and suicide. Woolf would later write in her diary: “Thinking is my fighting” (The Diary of Virginia Woolf, 1936–1941 [2023]).

Indeed, Bloomsbury fought against many of their Victorian forebearer’s attitudes, and the group generally identified with liberal, feminist, and — especially in the case of Leonard Woolf — socialist politics. However, as Gretchen Holbrook Gerzina writes, it is important to analyze the contexts, subjects and evolutions of these fights, especially in regards to race and empire (The Cambridge Companion to the Bloomsbury Group, 2014). As Gerzina notes, many of Bloomsbury’s ancestral or immediate families served the empire and as the Bloomsbury Set grew up, they “had begun to reject most of what it stood for” (2014) as they adopted more progressive ways of living. Many members wrote anti-imperialist essays, like Virginia Woolf’s “Thunder at Wembley” (1924), or channeled their critiques into works like E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India (1924), or Leonard Woolf’s The Village in the Jungle (1913) and Stories from the East (1921). However, Gerzina reminds us that these fictional and lived worlds that Bloomsbury created for itself did not “entirely reject the racial attitudes engendered by the very imperialism they had come to detest” (2014). Bloomsbury’s art and politics allow for a rich exploration of the contexts and contours of the early twentieth century, and the relationship between British modernism, metropolitanism, power, race, empire and colonialism.

Queerness 

It is impossible to talk of Bloomsbury without talking about its queerness. Indeed, as Helt and Detloff write: 

The Bloomsbury Group explored the meaning of family, love, sexuality, desire and gender, and set up practices that constituted, Helt and Detloff continue, “a way of living sexually, intellectually, artistically, ethically and intimately” (2016). At this time, homosexuality in Britain was illegal and books like Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness were banned due to their representation of sexual “inversion” (1928 [2014]), and yet Bloomsbury’s queer subculture could be seen in their own relationships — like that of Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West (explored in Sarah Gristwood’s Vita & Virginia, 2018), or the happy arrangement between Vanessa Bell, Grant and Barnett (Clarke, Queer Bloomsbury, 2016). The Bloomsbury Group set up queer domestic practices that pushed beyond family units or marriage as the only ways to cohabit. Bloomsbury’s queer subcultures were also expressed in their art — in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, for example, Clarissa thinks of Sally and wonders: 

Criticism

Bloomsbury has received heavy criticism since its inception, and has often been used as a shorthand for a snobbish elitism. As Helt and Detloff write, “Bloomsbury had its detractors before it even had a convenient label to which criticism might be appended” (2016). Indeed, after a quarrel with Fry after working together at the Omega Workshops, Wyndham Lewis became, in Julian Hanna’s words, Bloomsbury’s “most notorious enemy” (Key Concepts in Modernist Literature, 2008). Lewis satirized the group as a “select and snobbish club” in The Apes of God (1930 [1965]). Later, Hugh Kenner’s study of modernism would similarly depict Bloomsbury as elitist, insular, and unoriginal (A Sinking Ship, 1988). However, as Christopher Reed’s essay, “Bloomsbury Bashing: Homophobia and the Politics of Criticism in the Eighties” reveals, much of the early criticism that has been angled at Bloomsbury has been mired in “explicit homophobia,” misogyny and misinformation (1991).

Influence 

Bloomsbury is bound to the legacy of British modernism, which it helped to mold with its formal play and formation of ways of living and working that existed outside of Victorian conventions.. Interest in the set has persisted, too, with recent examples including Life in Squares (Kaijser, 2015), a BBC drama depicting the lives and loves of Bloomsbury, and Charleston’s continuing popularity as a tourist attraction and exhibition space which explores the group’s lasting legacy. As Virginia Nicholson — Vanessa Bell’s granddaughter, a historian, and the Charleston Trust’s deputy chair — remarks: Bloomsbury and Charleston is “not just about a few pretty patterns on the walls [...] it’s about a way of life and a set of values” (Rustin, “Boom time for the Bloomsbury group,” 2015). To this day, audiences continue to be fascinated by these lived practices and values, as well as the influential art that this subculture catalyzed. 

Further reading on Perlego 

Bowlby, R. (2016) Virginia Woolf. Taylor and Francis. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/1570137/virginia-woolf-pdf 

Hilal, Z. (2018) Modernism and Colonialism in E. M. Forster’s A Passage To India. Lap Lambert. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/3441602/modernism-and-colonialism-in-em-forsters-a-passage-to-india-pdf 

Högberg, E. (2020) Virginia Woolf and the Ethics of Intimacy. Bloomsbury. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/1343223/virginia-woolf-and-the-ethics-of-intimacy-pdf 

Martin, T. (2017) Katherine Mansfield and the Bloomsbury Group.. Bloomsbury. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/808817/katherine-mansfield-and-the-bloomsbury-group-pdf 

Wilson, M. (2016) The Labors of Modernism. Taylor and Francis. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/1633616/the-labors-of-modernism-domesticity-servants-and-authorship-in-modernist-fiction-pdf 

Zink, S. (2018) Virginia Woolf’s Rooms and the Spaces of Modernity. Springer International. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/3494857/virginia-woolfs-rooms-and-the-spaces-of-modernity-pdf 

External resources on the Bloomsbury Group

Eliott, B. J. and Wallace, J. (1994) Women Artists and Writers: Modernist (Im)positions. Routledge. Available at: https://www.routledgehistoricalresources.com/feminism/books/women-artists-and-writers 

Froula, C. (2006) Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Avant-garde: War, Civilization, Modernity. Columbia University Press. Available at: http://cup.columbia.edu/book/virginia-woolf-and-the-bloomsbury-avantgarde/9780231134446 

Hussey, M. (2022) Clive Bell and the Making of Modernism: A Biography. Bloomsbury. Available at: https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/clive-bell-and-the-making-of-modernism-9781408894439/ 

Lee. H. (1996) Virginia Woolf. Vintage. Available at: https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/360269/virginia-woolf-by-leehermione/9780099732518 

Roy, A. (2001) “‘Telling Brutal Things’: Colonialism, Bloomsbury and the Crisis of Narration in Leonard Woolf's ‘A Tale Told by Moonlight’,” Criticism, 43.2. Available at: https://muse.jhu.edu/article/8828 

Spalding, F. (2021) Vanessa Bell: Portrait of the Bloomsbury Artist. Bloomsbury. Available at: https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/vanessa-bell-9780755643554/ 

Stansky, P. (1996) On or About December 1910: Early Bloomsbury and its Intimate World, Harvard University Press. Available at: https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674636064#:~:text=This%20book%20captures%20the%20dazzling,rising%20generation%20seizing%20its%20moment 

Bibliography 

Atkin, J. (2013) A war of individuals. Manchester University Press. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/1526120/a-war-of-individuals-pdf 

Bell, C. (2005) Art. Perlego. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/1819935/art-pdf 

Bell, Q. (1986) Bloomsbury. Weidenfeld and Nicolson. Available at: https://www.worldcat.org/title/15222875 

Bell, V. (1993) Selected Letters. Bloomsbury. Available at: https://www.worldcat.org/title/31012754 

Bradshaw, D. and Dettmar, K. (2008) A Companion to Modernist Literature and Culture. Wiley. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/2748519/a-companion-to-modernist-literature-and-culture-pdf 

Childs, P. (2011) Modernist Literature: A Guide for the Perplexed. Bloomsbury. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/805886/modernist-literature-a-guide-for-the-perplexed-pdf 

Clarke, D. (2016) “Duncan Grant and Charleston’s Queer Arcadia,” in Queer Bloomsbury. Edinburgh University Press. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/1708656/queer-bloomsbury-pdf 

Forster, E. M. (2020) A Passage to India. Dreamscape Media. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/1377865/a-passage-to-india-pdf 

Gasiorek, A. (2015) A History of Modernist Literature. Wiley. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/1013004/a-history-of-modernist-literature-pdf 

Gerzina, G. H. (2014) “Bloomsbury and Empire,” in The Cambridge Companion to the Bloomsbury Group. Cambridge University Press. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781139087537 

Gristwood, S. (2018) Vita & Virginia: The Lives and Love of Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West. National Trust. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/2425811/vita-virginia-the-lives-and-love-of-virginia-woolf-and-vita-sackvillewest-pdf 

Hall, R. (2014) The Well of Loneliness. Hesperus Press Ltd. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/3045811/the-well-of-loneliness-pdf 

Hanna, J. (2008) Key Concepts in Modernist Literature. Bloomsbury Publishing. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/2997555/key-concepts-in-modernist-literature-pdf 

Helt, B. and Detloff, M. (2016) “Introduction,” in Queer Bloomsbury. Edinburgh University Press. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/1708656/queer-bloomsbury-pdf 

Kenner, H. (1998) A Sinking Ship. Knopf. Available at: https://www.worldcat.org/title/15856434 

Keynes, J. M. (2018) The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money. Springer International Publishing. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/3496996/the-general-theory-of-employment-interest-and-money-pdf 

Lewis, W. (1965) The Apes of God. Penguin. Available at: https://worldcat.org/title/365189 

Moore, G. E. (2016) Principia Ethica. Perlego. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/1821578/principia-ethica-pdf  

Reed, C. (1991) “Bloomsbury Bashing: Homophobia and the Politics of Criticism in the Eighties,” Genders, no. 11. Available at: https://www.utexaspressjournals.org/doi/abs/10.5555/gen.1991.11.58 

Rustin, S. (2015) “Boom time for the Bloomsbury group,” The Guardian. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/jun/05/bloomsbury-booming-legacy-celebrate-virginia-woolf 

Ryan, D. and Ross, S. (2018) “Introduction,” in The Handbook to the Bloomsbury Group. Bloomsbury. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/799869/the-handbook-to-the-bloomsbury-group-pdf 

Tate. (n.d.) “The Lifestyle and Legacy of the Bloomsbury Group,” Art and Artists. Available at: https://www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/b/bloomsbury/lifestyle-lives-and-legacy-bloomsbury-group 

Wolfe, J. (2011) Bloomsbury, Modernism and the Reinvention of Intimacy. Cambridge University Press. Available at: https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/bloomsbury-modernism-and-the-reinvention-of-intimacy/D5C131B76F098BFB07EC9BCF66422619 

Woolf, L. (2019) The Village in the Jungle. Perlego. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/1850365/the-village-in-the-jungle-pdf 

Woolf, L. (2019) Stories of the East. Perlego. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/1850376/stories-of-the-east-pdf 

Woolf, V. (1950) “Thunder at Wembley,” in The Captain’s Death Bed. Hogarth Press. Available at: https://www.worldcat.org/title/captains-death-bed-and-other-essays/oclc/1520049 

Woolf, V. (2019) Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown. Heritage Books. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/2907765/mr-bennett-and-mrs-brown-pdf  

Woolf, V. (2013) Mrs Dalloway. HarperCollins Publishers. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/671191/mrs-dalloway-pdf 

Woolf, V. (2017) The Waves. Delphi Classics. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/1654469/the-waves-by-virginia-woolf-delphi-classics-illustrated-pdf 

Woolf, V. (2017) Writer’s Diary. Delphi Classics. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/1654473/writers-diary-by-virginia-woolf-delphi-classics-illustrated-pdf 

Woolf, V. (2023) The Diary of Viriginia Woolf. Vol. 5. Granta Books. Available at: https://www.worldcat.org/title/1378021745 

Woolf, V. and Woolf, L. (2017) Two Stories. Penguin. Available at: https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/436244/two-stories-by-virginia-woolf/9781473549487 

Filmography

Life in Squares (2015) Directed by Simon Kaijser. Available at: Amazon Prime Video.