Bloomsbury group

The Bloomsbury group (or Bloomsberries) was a English literary group that existed from around 1905 until World War II. They met at the homes of members, principally in the Bloomsbury area of London. The movement centred on the home of Virginia Woolf and her family, including her sister, the painter Vanessa Bell. Members included Woolf herself, her husband Leonard Woolf, Nina Hamnett, E. M. Forster, Duncan Grant, Roger Fry, Lytton Strachey, Desmond MacCarthy and John Maynard Keynes.

The group began as an informal social assembly of recent Cambridge University graduates (four members had graduated in 1899) and their friends. They remained a tight-knit and highly exclusive group. The members strongly rejected the Victorian era strictures on religious, artistic, social, and sexual issues. They were a clique, including acquaintances, such as Lady Ottoline Morrell.

By the 1920s the group's reputation was sufficiently established that its mannerisms were parodied and the group is remembered mostly for the individual literary output of its members rather than any collaborative achievement. More recently the complex inter-personal relationships within the group have attracted scholarly attention.

Books

• The Loving Friends: A Portrait of Bloomsbury by David Gadd ISBN 0701203935