The Literary Marmoset
For all the High Modern sophistication of the writers who made up the Bloomsbury set in England in the early 1900s, there remains something creaturely about the collective. It is as if, beneath the frocks and tweeds, a simian itch lingered. To begin with, there were the names they gave one another, curious and whiskery terms of endearment: Virginia Woolf and her husband Leonard called each other Mandrill and Mongoose; Vanessa Bell referred to her sister as Singe ( in French) or Goat, while Vanessa herself was known as Dolphin; Virginia’s friend and sometime lover Vita Sackville-West gave her the private name of Potto, a kind of lemur;, Woolf’s imaginative consideration of the poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s cocker spaniel.
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