The Bloomsbury Group was an English collective of loving friends and relatives who lived in or near London during the first half of the twentieth century. Its members deeply influenced literature, aesthetics, criticism, and economics as well as modern attitudes towards feminism, pacifism, and sexuality. Best known were Virginia Woolf, John Maynard Keynes, E.M. Forster, Lytton Strachey, Duncan Grant, Vanessa Bell, Clive Bell, Roger Fry, and Leonard Woolf. The group actually began as a social clique: A few recent Cambridge graduates and their closest friends would assemble several nights a week for some drinks and conversation.

The group was first noticed by the outside world during the second decade of the twentieth century for its members' revolutionary intellectual views and critiques of aspects of Victorian and Edwardian culture, then on the wane. They attacked and provided alternatives to Victorian biography, art, fiction, economics, moral codes, history, imperialism, and militarism. They gathered an enthusiastic following primarily among the young. But they were also denounced as dangerously subversive by conservatives and traditionalists, especially for the postimpressionist art exhibitions they organized, their pacifism during World War I, their general irreverence toward their forbears, and their lifestyle.

Some features of the Bloomsbury Group that are most attractive and intriguing are:

• the remarkable amount of intellectual firepower that they could muster collectively;
• the general commitment of most of them to revolutionary change in the various areas that they represented -- art, economics, fiction, ethics, biography, criticism, history, political philosophy, psychology, aesthetics;
• the attention members paid to the thoughts of others in the group and the inclusion of the ideas of the others in their own work;
• their candor with others and with themselves;
• their sense of fun and joie de vivre, combined with
• their commitment to hard work (in whatever they were engaged) and improvement of human welfare.

Bloomsbury members also put their energy and money where their mouths were. The Omega Workshops (1913-1919) and the Hogarth Press (1917-1946) were pioneering attempts to spread art across society and throughout daily life.

For a timeline of Bloomsbury, click here.

The years between the wars (1919-1939) brought many of Bloomsbury's greatest triumphs:

• Virginia Woolf's and E.M. Forster's novels
• Lytton Strachey's biographies
• Keynes's economic classics
• the Hogarth Press
• Frye's aesthetics

but they also brought tragedies:


• the deaths of Lytton Strachey, Roger Fry, and Julian Bell
• and the suicides of Dora Carrington and Virginia Woolf.

During these years, and in the years right after World War II, they were attacked for being elitist snobs, inferior to those they admired (e.g., the French Postimpressionists), and destructive of the moral fiber that had sustained the British Empire. They were criticized for leaving London (in the main) and moving to the country, where, it was alleged, they could ignore the sufferings of the depression, the horrors of industrialization, and the rising tide of authoritarian rule worldwide.

Over the last decade, there has been abundant scholarly attention to Bloomsbury in articles and books that reproduce source materials and provide interpretations. In 1999-2000, the Tate Gallery in London devoted a major exhibition to "The Art of Bloomsbury" (which traveled to California's Huntington Library and to Yale).

The Courtauld Gallery in London devoted an exhibition entirely to Roger Fry, and there have been numerous smaller exhibitions at other galleries. Art critics have been almost universally scathing of Bloomsbury art, but the public has been exceptionally enthusiastic.

Now, an exhibition at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, A Room of Their Own: The Bloomsbury Artists in American Collections, premieres at Duke in December 2008 before moving to the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University and to other U.S. museums.

The revival of interest in Bloomsbury since World War II has been based, primarily, on four developments:

1. There was a growing appreciation (especially in America) of Virginia Woolf as a literary genius and pioneer in the changing role of women in society. Study of her life and works has been facilitated by publication of her letters, diary, essays, and several biographies. The recent biography, Virginia Woolf, by Hermione Lee, is especially good.
2. There has been a sharp focus on Keynesian economics that at first seemed to be merely tangled (1930s), then simple and useful (1940s-1960s), and finally much more complex than first believed (today). Discussion of Keynes was undoubtedly stimulated by the publication by the Royal Economic Society of his collected writings in 31 volumes. Two excellent recent biographies are Maynard Keynes: An Economist's Biography, by Donald Moggridge, and John Maynard Keynes: 1883-1946: Economist, Philosopher, Statesman, Volumes I-III, by Robert Skidelsky.
3. A highly entertaining biography, Lytton Strachey: The New Biography, by Michael Holroyd in 1967, lifted the wraps off the personal lives of the members, which were found in some cases to rival a soap opera. ("They lived in squares and loved in triangles.") A criticism that may be made of this prurient attention is that it leads to neglect of the artistic and intellectual activities around which their lives revolved. The 1995 major motion picture Carrington is in this prurient tradition.
4. After Duncan Grant's death in 1978, the Charleston Farmhouse near Lewes in Sussex, long a center of Bloomsbury activities, was closed up and abandoned. In the 1980s, a group of friends and admirers of Bloomsbury, in Britain and America (notably Lila Acheson Wallace of Reader's Digest) provided the means to restore and open Charleston to the public. Now, each year, thousands of visitors come to see how this center of Bloomsbury looked during its heyday. Monks House, the home of Virginia and Leonard, is a National Trust property open to the public in nearby Rodmell.