Averitable industry has grown up around Bloomsbury, the group of writers, artists and intellectuals that was, in poet Stephen Spender’s opinion, “the most constructive and creative influence on English taste between the two wars”. Its history and idiosyncrasies have become the subject of countless articles, books, exhibitions, documentaries, plays, TV series, films and ballets. Its reputation has travelled far, to many places around the world.
The chief reason that the Bloomsbury Group remains such a source of fascination more than 100 years after it first emerged is the brilliance of its members. Among its leading lights was Roger Fry – whose championing of Post-Impressionist art in the years leading up to the First World War caused uproar in London – and Lytton Strachey, whose Eminent Victorians brought an irreverent humour to the art of writing biographies. The group also included John Maynard Keynes who, after witnessing the Treaty of Versailles, wrote The Economic Consequences of the Peace, in which he argued that the harsh war reparations would lead to the financial collapse of Germany. And, of course, there was Virginia Woolf – author of Mrs Dalloway (1925) and A Room of One’s Own (1929) – who, having declared her intention to “reform the novel”, went about doing exactly that.
With London as their base, the Bloomsbury Group established an intricate network of social, sexual and hereditary relationships that led the writer Dorothy Parker to remark that they “lived in squares… and loved in triangles”. From
