Bloomsbury Group
The Bloomsbury Group was a group of associated British writers, intellectuals, philosophers and artists in the early 20th century. Among the people involved in the group were Virginia Woolf, John Maynard Keynes, E. M. Forster, Vanessa Bell, and Lytton Strachey. Their works and outlook deeply influenced literature, aesthetics, criticism, and economics, as well as modern attitudes towards feminism, pacifism, and sexuality.
Although popularly thought of as a formal group, it was a loose collective of friends and relatives closely associated with the University of Cambridge for the men and King's College London for the women, who at one point lived, worked or studied together near Bloomsbury, London. According to Ian Ousby, "although its members denied being a group in any formal sense, they were united by an abiding belief in the importance of the arts." The historian Raymond Williams disputed the existence of the group and the extent of its impact.
Origins
All male members of the Bloomsbury Group, except Duncan Grant, were educated at Cambridge. Most of them, except Clive Bell and the Stephen brothers, were members of "the exclusive Cambridge society, the 'Apostles'". At Trinity in 1899 Lytton Strachey, Leonard Woolf, Saxon Sydney-Turner and Clive Bell became good friends with Thoby Stephen, and it was through Thoby and Adrian Stephen's sisters Vanessa and Virginia that the men met the women of Bloomsbury when they came down to London.In 1905 Vanessa began the "Friday Club" and Thoby ran "Thursday Evenings", which became the basis for the Bloomsbury Group, which to some was really "Cambridge in London". Thoby's premature death in 1906 brought them more firmly together and they became what is now known as the "Old Bloomsbury" group who met in earnest beginning in 1912. In the 1920s and 1930s the group shifted when the original members died and the next generation had reached adulthood.
The Bloomsbury Group, mostly from upper middle-class professional families, formed part of "an intellectual aristocracy which could trace itself back to the Clapham Sect". It was an informal network of an influential group of artists, art critics, writers and an economist, many of whom lived in the West Central 1 district of London known as Bloomsbury. They were "spiritually" similar to the Clapham group who supported its members' careers: "The Bloomsberries promoted one another's work and careers just as the original Claphamites did, as well as the intervening generations of their grandparents and parents."
A historical feature of these friends and relations is that their close relationships all pre-dated their fame as writers, artists, and thinkers.
Membership
Members
The group had ten core members:- Clive Bell, art critic
- Vanessa Bell, post-impressionist painter
- E. M. Forster, fiction writer
- Roger Fry, art critic and post-impressionist painter
- Duncan Grant, post-impressionist painter
- John Maynard Keynes, economist
- Desmond MacCarthy, literary journalist
- Lytton Strachey, biographer
- Leonard Woolf, essayist and non-fiction writer
- Virginia Woolf, fiction writer and essayist
There were stable marriages and varied and complicated affairs among the individual members. Lytton Strachey and his cousin and lover Duncan Grant became close friends of the Stephen sisters, Vanessa Bell and Virginia Woolf. Duncan Grant had affairs with siblings Vanessa Bell and Adrian Stephen, as well as David Garnett, Maynard Keynes, and James Strachey. Clive Bell married Vanessa in 1907, and Leonard Woolf returned from the Ceylon Civil Service to marry Virginia in 1912. Cambridge Apostle friendships brought into the group Desmond MacCarthy, his wife Molly, and E. M. Forster.
The group met not only in their homes in Bloomsbury, central London, but also at countryside retreats. There are two significant ones near Lewes in Sussex: Charleston Farmhouse, where Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant moved in 1916, and Monk's House, in Rodmell, owned by Virginia and Leonard Woolf from 1919.
Others
Much about Bloomsbury appears to be controversial, including its membership and name: indeed, some would maintain that "the three words 'the Bloomsbury group' have been so much used as to have become almost unusable".Close friends, brothers, sisters, and even sometimes partners of the friends were not necessarily members of Bloomsbury: Keynes's wife Lydia Lopokova was only reluctantly accepted into the group, and there were certainly "writers who were at some time close friends of Virginia Woolf, but who were distinctly not 'Bloomsbury': T. S. Eliot, Katherine Mansfield, Hugh Walpole". Another is Vita Sackville-West, who became "Hogarth Press's best-selling author". Members cited in "other lists might include Ottoline Morrell, or Dora Carrington, or James and Alix Strachey".
Shared ideas
The lives and works of the group members show an overlapping, interconnected similarity of ideas and attitudes that helped to keep the friends and relatives together, reflecting in large part the influence of G. E. Moore: "the essence of what Bloomsbury drew from Moore is contained in his statement that 'one's prime objects in life were love, the creation and enjoyment of aesthetic experience and the pursuit of knowledge'".Philosophy and ethics
Through the Apostles they also encountered the analytic philosophers G. E. Moore and Bertrand Russell who were revolutionizing British philosophy at the start of the 20th century. Distinguishing between ends and means was a commonplace of ethics, but what made Moore's Principia Ethica so important for the philosophical basis of Bloomsbury thought was Moore's conception of intrinsic worth as distinct from instrumental value. As with the distinction between love and monogamy, Moore's differentiation between intrinsic and instrumental value allowed the Bloomsburies to maintain an ethical high-ground based on intrinsic merit, independent of, and without reference to, the consequences of their actions. For Moore, intrinsic value depended on an indeterminable 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. For both Moore and Bloomsbury, the greatest ethic goods were "the importance of personal relationships and the private life", as well as aesthetic appreciation: "art for art's sake".Rejection of bourgeois habits
Bloomsbury reacted against current upper class English social rituals, "the bourgeois habits ... the conventions of Victorian life" with their emphasis on public achievement, in favour of a more informal and private focus on personal relationships and individual pleasure. E. M. Forster for example approved of "the decay of smartness and fashion as factors, and the growth of the idea of enjoyment", and asserted that "if I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country".The Group "believed in pleasure ... They tried to get the maximum of pleasure out of their personal relations. If this meant triangles or more complicated geometric figures, well then, one accepted that too". Yet at the same time, they shared a sophisticated, civilized, and highly articulated ideal of pleasure. As Virginia Woolf put it, their "triumph is in having worked out a view of life which was not by any means corrupt or sinister or merely intellectual; rather ascetic and austere indeed; which still holds, and keeps them dining together, and staying together, after 20 years".
Politics
Politically, Bloomsbury held mainly left-liberal stances ; but its "clubs and meetings were not activist, like the political organisations to which many of Bloomsbury's members also belonged", and they would be criticised for that by their 1930s successors, who by contrast were "heavily touched by the politics which Bloomsbury had rejected".The campaign for women's suffrage added to the controversial nature of Bloomsbury, as Virginia Woolf represented the group in the fictional The Years and Night and Day works about the suffrage movement.
Art
Roger Fry joined the group in 1910. His Post-Impressionist exhibitions of 1910 and 1912 involved Bloomsbury in a second revolution following on the Cambridge philosophical one. This time the Bloomsbury painters were much involved and influenced. Fry and other Bloomsbury artists rejected the traditional distinction between fine and decorative art.These "Bloomsbury assumptions" are reflected in members' criticisms of materialistic realism in painting and fiction, influenced above all by Clive Bell's "concept of 'Significant Form', which separated and elevated the concept of form above content in works of art": it has been suggested that, with their "focus on form ...Bell's ideas have come to stand in for, perhaps too much so, the aesthetic principles of the Bloomsbury Group".
The establishment's hostility to post-impressionism made Bloomsbury controversial, and controversial they have remained. Clive Bell polemicized post-impressionism in his widely read book Art, basing his aesthetics partly on Roger Fry's art criticism and G. E. Moore's moral philosophy; and as the war came he argued that "in these days of storm and darkness, it seemed right that at the shrine of civilization - in Bloomsbury, I mean - the lamp should be tended assiduously".
World War I
Old Bloomsbury's development was affected, along with much of modernist culture, by the First World War: "the small world of Bloomsbury was later said by some on its outskirts to have been irretrievably shattered", though in fact its friendships "survived the upheavals and dislocations of war, in many ways were even strengthened by them". Most but not all of them were conscientious objectors. Politically, the members of Bloomsbury had liberal and socialist leanings.Though the war dispersed Old Bloomsbury, the individuals continued to develop their careers. E. M. Forster followed his successful novels with Maurice which he could not publish because it treated homosexuality untragically. In 1915, Virginia Woolf brought out her first novel, The Voyage Out; and in 1917 the Woolfs founded their Hogarth Press, which would publish T. S. Eliot, Katherine Mansfield, and many others including Virginia herself along with the standard English translations of Freud. Then in 1918 Lytton Strachey published his critique of Victorianism in the shape of four iconoclastic biographies in Eminent Victorians, which added to the arguments about Bloomsbury that continue to this day, and "brought him the triumph he had always longed for ... The book was a sensation".
The following year came J. M. Keynes's influential attack on the Versailles Peace Treaty: The Economic Consequences of the Peace established Maynard as a prominent economist and political economist of international eminence.