The new radicals: how the Bloomsbury Group transformed British culture

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.

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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 those squares, they shaped cultural tastes for decades to come.

Defying description

For a creative force whose influence was so wide-ranging, the Bloomsbury Group is difficult to pin down. Even their title seems to be the outcome of mere happenstance, for they first began holding regular meetings together in the early 1900s in an area of London, south of the three great rail terminals – Euston, St Pancras and King’s Cross – called ‘Bloomsbury’. This name took hold when Molly MacCarthy, the wife of Desmond MacCarthy, a central figure, began referring to its members as the ‘Bloomsberries’.

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Those involved were active across several fields – art, art criticism, economics, journal- ism, literature, publishing, political and social theory. Their manner of living was based on the habit of regular and persistent work. But, as a group, they had no party line, no membership rules and no manifesto.

They were a tolerant lot, accepting sexual or political differences within the group, and only once coming close to an almighty row: during the First World War, the pacifists among them ganged up against John Maynard Keynes, then working for the government in the Treasury, and accused him of using his knowledge to help finance the war.

The shared interests and reformist ideals that characterised Bloomsbury were discovered through their love of conversation. Many of them – Lytton Strachey, Clive Bell, Leonard Woolf and Desmond MacCarthy – had become friends with Thoby Stephen (the brother of Bell’s future wife, painter Vanessa Bell) through their association with Cambridge. And all came from a highly educated part of the upper-middle class, except Woolf.

Born into a Jewish family that had only recently risen into the professional middle class, he was made acutely aware of the privileges they enjoyed: “Socially they assumed things unconsciously which I could never assume either unconsciously or consciously. They lived in a peculiar atmosphere of influence, manners, respectability.” This was the background against which Bloomsbury drew its strength and against which it was to rebel.

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Rejecting repression

Looking back at Bloomsbury from the vantage point of the 21st century, it is astonishing to realise that these men and women were in fact Victorians, born into a highly repressive culture.

One of the most determining influences on Vanessa Bell and her need to escape the conventions constricting her early adulthood must have been her family home in Kensington’s Hyde Park Gate.

In 1904, the young painter surprised her relatives by removing herself and her three siblings from Kensington to Bloomsbury in the wake of their father’s death. Leslie Stephen had latterly been knighted for his eminence as a man of letters and for editing 26 volumes of the Dictionary of National Biography.

But he had also become self-pitying, tearful and tyrannical, and the home, with its Victorian furniture and heavy, velvet curtains, seemed dark and unhappy. Most days of the week, Vanessa and her sister Virginia were obliged to hold tea parties for his visitors. Tea-table conversation had to be polite: a great many words were used, but little of interest was said.

All this changed with the move to Bloomsbury, to 46 Gordon Square, a classical, Regency terraced house. Vanessa decided to start holding ‘At Homes’, informal after-dinner gatherings at which the choice of drink was simply hot chocolate.

Cards were sent out to their aunts and Kensington friends and to Thoby’s companions at Cambridge, where he was studying. This produced an awkward mix.

On one occasion a name game was played in which the names of people and places were called out after a particular letter of the alphabet had been chosen. When ‘G’ was announced, one Cambridge wit shot out the words ‘Jerusalem’ and ‘Jesus’, teasingly playing with the similarity in sound between ‘G’ and ‘J’.

This shocked family relatives who had never before heard these sacred names treated with such flippancy. Before long, they and others of the older generation decided to stay away from these gatherings, thereby enabling Thoby’s friends to become more prominent.

It is worth noticing that when Thoby Stephen invited his Cambridge friends to attend ‘At Homes’ and introduced them to his sisters, who had not received a university education, he in effect brought Cambridge’s love of debate and philosophical discussion into Bloomsbury. Here Bloomsbury began.

The visual expression of this showed in Vanessa’s management of the house. She had some of the rooms painted white. She draped Indian shawls over chairs and tables, delighting in their richness when seen against the white walls. She also hung in the hallway two rows of high-art photographs taken by her great-aunt Julia Margaret Cameron.

And she struck out against middle-class conventions. Vanessa’s sister, Virginia Woolf, later recalled: “We were full of experiments and reforms. We were going to do without table napkins... we were going to paint; to write; to have coffee after dinner instead of tea at nine o’clock...”

How should you live? What was the nature of good? What philosophy could be found to support and justify the good life? These were the kind of questions that arose at this time and they awakened a fresh desire for intellectual honesty. In the history books, Bloomsbury takes its place within the wider development of liberal thought. For it was not only in England that certain moral conventions and social customs came to seem stale and outmoded.

What distinguishes Bloomsbury from its Victorian predecessors was the emphasis it placed on private life. Whereas the Victorians had paid a great deal of attention to public virtue, this younger generation was to focus instead on personal relations, on the grounds that unless honesty can be found close at hand, it is unlikely to be found in the larger, more public sphere.

Tightest of circles

The untimely death of Thoby Stephen, in 1906, resulting from typhoid fever contracted while on holiday in Asia Minor, drew this circle closer together. The loss of Thoby seems to have affected Vanessa’s decision to accept a proposal of marriage from Clive Bell, which she had previously turned down. Less than six years later her sister was to marry another of their late brother’s friends, Leonard Woolf.

In addition, the group was made additionally close-knit by several temporary homosexual alliances: Lytton Strachey, Adrian Stephen (Thoby’s younger brother) and Maynard Keynes were all at one point in love with Duncan Grant, the painter and cousin of Lytton Strachey. (The facetious remark that Bloomsbury was a group of friends who all happened to be in love with Duncan Grant has in it a modicum of truth.)

In 1910 Roger Fry made his first appearance within Bloomsbury and almost immediately became a central figure. He was aware that for almost 30 years, Britain had more or less turned its back on developments in French art, scarcely looking at the French impressionists and ignoring the post-impressionists. His aim was to bring bundles of Cézannes, Van Goghs and Gauguins to London, to form an exhibition titled ‘Manet and the Post-Impressionists’.

It caused a furore, as this innovative French art seemed to challenge English notions of beauty. Fry engaged his new friends in helping to fight the cause of modern art, and thereby drew Bloomsbury out of the privacy of the drawing room into a very noisy, public debate.

Until then, no one in Bloomsbury had attracted much public notice. But in 1915 Virginia Woolf published her first novel, The Voyage Out. Three years later Lytton Strachey produced Eminent Victorians. In 1919, Maynard Keynes sounded his warning on onerous war reparations. And in 1920, Roger Fry published Vision and Design, a book of essays on art, written from the modern point of view, and still in print today.

But this was just the beginning of Bloomsbury’s impact on culture in Britain between two world wars.

Although London, as a cultural hub and a site of modernity, was Bloomsbury’s main setting, they also regularly retreated to the country, and enjoyed its different rhythms. The most famous Bloomsbury residence is Charleston, where the Bloomsbury decorative style spread like some vigorous vegetable growth throughout the whole house. It sits at the foot of Firle Beacon, on the South Downs.

Charleston’s beauty made it an outstanding place to visit, but what attracted many of its Bloomsbury guests was the way Vanessa Bell (who lived there with Duncan Grant) managed hospitality without fuss. This farmhouse is only four miles away from Rodmell, also in Sussex, where Leonard and Virginia Woolf had a country retreat. Much toing and froing went on between the two houses.

“Charleston is as usual,” Virginia Woolf wrote in the summer of 1922. “One hears Clive shouting in the garden before one arrives. Nessa emerges from a great variegated quilt of asters and artichokes; not very cordial... Then Duncan drifts in, also vague, absent-minded, and incredibly wrapped round with yellow waistcoats, spotted ties, and old blue stained painting jackets.”

An irritating clique?

The Bloomsbury Group was a remarkably long-standing phenomenon. During the early 1940s, it set up the Memoir Club, to spur its members into writing about the past, in a philosophical or entertaining manner, and to revive again the habit of meeting regularly.

In c1943, Vanessa Bell produced a group portrait of the club. As three of its members – Lytton Strachey, Roger Fry and Virginia Woolf – had by then died, she included on the background wall miniature copies of known portraits of them all. The picture can be found today in London’s National Portrait Gallery.

As time went on, the fact that Bloomsbury was to some extent a clique irritated many. It began to attract criticism, and it was not until the last quarter of the 20th century that its admirers began vastly to exceed its critics.

After the Second World War, Virginia Woolf’s diaries, which filled more than 30 volumes, sat silent in the vault of the National Westminster bank in Lewes. In America her fame as a novelist began to fade, and by the 1960s her name for many young American women was more readily connected with Edward Albee’s play Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf (1962) than with any of her own works.

An important landmark, in the revival of interest in Woolf, was the two-volume biography of her, written by her nephew Quentin Bell at the request of Leonard Woolf. It was the first official biography, came out in 1972 and opened her life to the public. The demand for her books rocketed.

Still today A Room of One’s Own is cited in booklists for courses in women’s studies. It is a product of deep reflection on women, society, literature, and what matters in life, but it is delivered in a light, gently ironical, conversational tone.

Today Woolf ’s writings reach across the usual cultural divides of gender, class, education, race and nationality, thereby altering and enriching millions of lives. Virginia Woolf Societies and annual conferences on her work flourish in countries and cultures very different to her own.

Suppleness of mind

Bloomsbury was above all impressive in the loyalty its members gave to their friends. By fostering close association within Bloomsbury, they opened themselves to new areas of thought and feeling, encouraged a suppleness of mind and developed an emotional intelligence that valued tolerance.

True, most did come from upper middle-class families, which Noel Annan described as the “intellectual aristocracy”, but they had no time for the pursuit of social prestige or for the display of wealth. They rated the life of the mind as more important than material gain, and when Leonard Woolf became a publisher, he never published a book for commercial reasons alone. He worked with others to create the League of Nations and advised the Labour Party on international politics.

Maynard Keynes, as a leading economist, remains famous for overturning the prevailing idea that free markets would automatically provide full employment. The artists Fry, Bell and Grant not only created the Omega Workshops (1913–19) but continued to play a key role within the production of art and decorative arts in Britain.

In 1925, in one of the rare occasions when Virginia Woolf commented on the group, she praised her Bloomsbury friends for “having worked out a view of life which was not by any means corrupt and sinister or merely intellectual: rather ascetic and austere indeed; which still holds, and keeps them dining together, and staying together, after 20 years; and no amount of quarrelling or success, or failure has altered this. Now I do think,” she concludes, “this rather creditable.”

Frances Spalding is emeritus fellow of Clare Hall, Cambridge and author of The Real and the Romantic: English Art Between Two World Wars (Thames & Hudson Ltd, 2022)

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