History
The Bloomsbury Group
The Bloomsbury Group was an English collectivity of friends and relatives who lived in or near London during the first half of the twentieth century.
Their work deeply influenced literature, aesthetics, criticism, and economics as well as modern attitudes towards feminism, pacifism, and sexuality. Its best known members were Virginia Woolf, John Maynard Keynes, E. M. Forster, and Lytton Strachey.
The Bloomsbury Group has featured in many works of fiction, including, notably, Michael Cunningham's The Hours and Susan Sellers' Vanessa and Virginia.
Description
Almost everything about Bloomsbury appears to be controversial, including its membership and name. It is now widely accepted, however, that the group initially consisted of the novelists and essayists Virginia Woolf, E. M. Forster, and Mary (Molly) MacCarthy, the biographer and essayist Lytton Strachey, the economist John Maynard Keynes, the painters Duncan Grant, Vanessa Bell, and Roger Fry, and the critics of literature, art, and politics, Strachey, Fry, Desmond MacCarthy, Clive Bell, and Leonard Woolf.
Vanessa Bell and Virginia Woolf were sisters, and their brothers, the older Thoby and the younger Adrian, were also original members of the group, as were some other Cambridge figures such as the enigmatic Saxon Sydney-Turner. Lytton Strachey and Duncan Grant - later Vanessa's partner - were cousins. During the earlier years of the group's history there were various affairs among the individuals. Most of the members lived for considerable periods of time in the West Central 1 district of London known as Bloomsbury, and 'group' seems to be the best general term to describe the nature of their association, which was not merely social as the terms 'circle' or 'set' may imply.
A remarkable historical feature of these friends and relations is that their close relationships all predated their fame as writers, artists, and thinkers. Yet close friends, brothers, sisters, and even sometimes partners of the friends were not necessarily members of Bloomsbury. Lytton Strachey's companion the painter Dora Carrington was never a member; Keynes's wife Lydia Lopokova was only reluctantly accepted into the group. Other members seemed to be socialite and society hostess Lady Ottoline Morrell, Virginia Woolf's long term lover Vita Sackville-West, Arthur Waley, and others mentioned in Woolf's letters and diaries.
Essentialist definers of Bloomsbury have sometimes questioned the existence of the group. Yet the lives and works of the group show an overlapping, interconnected similarity of ideas and attitudes that helped to keep the friends and relatives of the group together. Their convictions about the nature of consciousness and its relation to external nature, about the fundamental separateness of individuals that involves both isolation and love, about the human and non-human nature of time and death, and about the ideal goods of truth love and beauty - all these underlie the group's dissatisfaction with capitalism and its wars of imperialism. These Bloomsbury assumptions also inform their criticism of materialistic realism in painting and fiction as well as Bloomsbury's attacks on their society's repressive practices of sexual inequality, and their attempts to establish a new social order based upon liberation from the restrictive norms of established society. Love was held in higher esteem than monogamy, and several of the members had more than one serious relationship simultaneously, in the spirit of what came to be known as polyfidelity later in the 20th century. (term attributed to Nicholas Albery, author of "The Book of Social Inventions").
Origins
The Bloomsbury Group came from mostly upper middle-class professional families. E. M. Forster, Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell had small independent incomes. Others such as Lytton Strachey, Leonard Woolf, the MacCarthys, Duncan Grant, and Roger Fry needed to work for their livings. Only Clive Bell could be called wealthy. All the male members of the early Bloomsbury Group except Duncan Grant were educated at the Cambridge colleges of Trinity College or King's College. At Trinity in 1899 Lytton Strachey, Leonard Woolf, Saxon Sydney-Turner and Clive Bell became good friends with Thoby Stephen, who introduced them to his sisters Vanessa and Virginia in London, and in this way the Bloomsbury Group came into being.
All the Cambridge men except Clive Bell and the Stephen brothers were also members of the secret undergraduate society known as the Cambridge Apostles; there they met older members such as Desmond MacCarthy and Roger Fry as well as E. M. Forster and J. M. Keynes, who were all from King's College. Through the Apostles Bloomsbury also encountered the analytic philosophers G. E. Moore and Bertrand Russell who were revolutionizing British philosophy at the turn of the century. Moore's Principia Ethica (1903) provided Bloomsbury with a moral philosophy that fundamentally differentiated intrinsic from instrumental value. Distinguishing between ethical end and means was a commonplace of ethics, but what made Principia Ethica so important for Bloomsbury was Moore's conception of intrinsic worth. For Moore intrinsic value depended on an unanalysable 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. The greatest goods for Moore and Bloomsbury were ideals of personal relations and aesthetic appreciation. But more important than these for the group's values was the recurrent questioning of human behaviour in terms of instrumental means and intrinsic ends.
Source: Wikipedia - "Bloomsbury Group"
Last Updated: 17 March 2009