The Bloomsbury Group has been much in our minds this month while in England.  I read Virginia Woolf and E.M. Forster, we visited the Bloomsbury room at the Courtauld Gallery, and we walked around their old neighborhood in Gordon Square. While at the Courtauld, Susan bought this book and passed it on to me after she read it, and I’m pleased she did.

I have long been fascinated by this group of writers, thinkers, artists, critics, and intellectuals who gravitated to this neighborhood in Bloomsbury beginning in 1904.  Virginia Woolf and her sister Vanessa (later Bell) along with their two brothers moved there when their father, Sir Leslie Stephens, died, and they began to have ‘at homes’ for conversation and intellectual exchange.  One brother, Thoby, brought home his friends from Trinity College, Cambridge including Clive Bell, Lytton Strachey, Desmond McCarthy and Leonard Woolf.  Along the way, the artist and art critic Roger Fry, the artist Duncan Grant, the economist John Maynard Keynes, the philosopher Bertrand Russell, and a number of others joined the group who Dorothy Parker described as, “Lived in Squares, painted in circles, and loved in triangles.”

The book has an excellent introduction providing the background for the intellectual ferment of the time abetted by the tragic loss of life in WWI, the loss of religious belief, and the advent of Post-Impressionism in art and Modernism in literature.

The 18 biographies include all the usual suspects mentioned above but also fascinating stories of several individuals whom I had never heard of.  Dora Carrington was in love with Lytton Strachey, painted wonderful portraits of a number of the group, and killed herself when Strachey died.  Frances Partridge who lived to 104 dying in 2004, married Ralph Partridge who had been Strachey’s lover, was an early woman graduate of Oxford, and wrote remarkable diaries.  Gerald Brenan was a young man when he fell in love with Dora Carrington and after her suicide, he lived in a remote rural region of Spain and became a Spanish national treasure in writing about its people, history and literature.  And on and on in this remarkably interesting book.

A wonderful feature of the book is that each biography is accompanied by a painting or photograph of the individual, many of them done by other members of the Bloomsbury Group such as Fry, Grant, or Carrington.

All in all, this is a wonderful introduction to this world of 100 years ago that continues to influence writing, art, and thought today.