The Bloomsbury Group: Living in Squares

"One had glimpses of something miraculous happening high up in the air."

Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant, Roger Fry, Virginia Woolf

There was nothing at all unusual about it, I daresay, except that for some reason we seemed to be a company of the young, all free, all beginning life in new surroundings, without elders to whom we had to account in any way for our doings or behaviour, and this was not then common in a mixed company of our class.

Vanessa Bell

The Bloomsbury Group was a circle of artists, writers, intellectuals, and friends who shared a passion for social progress and creative innovation and contributed significantly to the early twentieth century's art, literature, and thinking.

They came from primarily upper-middle-class backgrounds and were linked by their resistance to the prevailing Victorian attitudes at that time and a desire to live their lives on their terms.

We found ourselves living in the springtime of a conscious revolt against the social, political, religious, moral, intellectual and artistic institutions, beliefs and standards of our fathers and grandfathers. The battle, which was against what for short one may call Victorianism, had not yet been won, and what was so exciting was our feeling that we were part of the revolution, that victory or defeat depended to some extent on what we said or wrote. We were out to construct something new; we were in the van of the builders of a new society.

Leonard Woolf

The boundaries of the group are shifting, but Old Bloomsbury membership lists usually include Thoby Stephen, Saxon Sydney-Turner, Adrian Stephen, Karin Stephen, and Molly MacCarthy, with its ten core members being:

Vanessa Bell, 1879 to 1961 - An innovative artist and interior designer, best known for her vibrant and bold paintings such as Studland Beach (c. 1912) and The Conversation (1913-16), and her dust-jacket designs for her sister Virginia Woolf’s books - published by The Hogarth Press.

Duncan Grant, 1885 to 1978 - Famous for his post-impressionist paintings of portraits, landscapes and still life, such as Vanessa Bell (1919), Male Nude (1930), Regent’s Park (1935), and Vase of Flowers (1963). He was also a textile, pottery, theatre sets, and costume designer, working with Roger Fry and Vanessa Bell at the Omega Workshops.

Roger Fry, 1866 to 1934 - Art critic and painter who introduced modern French painting to Britain and coined the term Post-Impressionism. His many books on art include Art History as an Academic Study (1933), The Artist and Psycho-Analysis (1924), Vision and Design (1920), Characteristics of French Art (1932), Reflections on British Painting (1934), and Last Lectures (1933).

Virginia Woolf, 1882 to 1941 - One of the most important writers of the twentieth century and best known for her novels The Voyage Out (1915), Mrs Dalloway (1925) To the Lighthouse (1927), Orlando (1928), The Waves (1931), The Years (1936), and Between the Acts (1941). She was also an influential essayist, writing on feminism, artistic theory and literary history.

Leonard Woolf, 1880 to 1969 - Non-fiction writer, publisher, political theorist and journalist who influenced literary and political life. He is the author of six autobiographies and nineteen individual works, including The Village in the Jungle (1913), The Future of Constantinople (1917), The Framework of a Lasting Peace (1917), Economic Imperialism (1920), Fear and Politics (1925), Essays on Literature, History, Politics (1927), and The War for Peace (1940).

Clive Bell, 1881 to 1964 - Art critic who championed Post-Impressionism in Britain and developed the theory of significant form. His books include Art (1914), Pot-boilers (1918), Since Cezanne (1922), Civilization (1928), Proust (1929), An Account of French Painting (1931), and Old Friends (1956).

Lytton Strachey, 1880 to 1932 - Writer and critic who established a new form of biographical writing at the close of World War I. His books include Landmarks in French Literature (1912), Eminent Victorians: Cardinal Manning, Florence Nightingale, Dr. Arnold, General Gordon (1918), Queen Victoria (1921), Books and Characters (1922), Elizabeth and Essex: A Tragic History, Portraits in Miniature and Other Essays (1931).

E M Forster, 1879 to 1970 - Essayist, social and literary critic, playwright, biographer and short story writer. He is also one of the most successful Edwardian-era novelists and probably most famous for his six novels Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905), The Longest Journey (1907), A Room with a View (1908), Howards End (1910), A Passage to India (1924), and Maurice (written in 1913–14, but published posthumously in 1971).

John Maynard Keynes, 1883 to 1946 - One of the most influential economists of the last century, whose ideas changed government policies and macroeconomics, and author of The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1935–36). His other works include Indian Currency and Finance (1913), A Treatise on Money (1930), and How to Pay for the War: A Radical Plan for the Chancellor of the Exchequer (1940).

Sir Desmond MacCarthy, 1887 to 1952 - Journalist and celebrated literary and drama critic. His volumes of collected writings include The Court Theatre (1907), Portraits (1931), Drama (1940), Shaw (1951), Memories (1953), Humanities (1953), and Theatre (1955). He was knighted in 1951.

Dora Carrington (artist), Katherine Mansfield (writer), Lydia Lopokova (ballerina), Lady Ottoline Morrell (aristocrat and socialite), T S Eliot (poet), Vita Sackville-West (writer and garden designer), and James and Alix Strachey (psychoanalysts), are often considered to be close associates of the group, but not Bloomsbury.

It was a marvellous combination of the highest intelligence, & appreciation of literature combined with a lean humour & tremendous affection. They gave it backwards and forwards to each other like shuttlecocks, only the shuttlecocks multiplied as they flew in the air.

Dora Carrington

The origins of the group can be traced back to 1904 when, following the death of her father, Leslie Stephen, celebrated writer, literary critic, and editor of the Dictionary of National Biography, twenty-five-year-old aspiring artist Vanessa envisioned a freer bohemian lifestyle for herself and her younger siblings.

Their mother Julia had died of unexpected heart failure in 1895, aged forty-nine, and their stepsister Stella Duckworth of peritonitis in 1897 - aged just twenty-eight. Leaving their stepbrothers George and Gerald Duckworth behind, and despite opposition from their older relatives, Vanessa, Thoby, Virginia, and Adrian moved from their Victorian home in upper-middle-class Kensington to the then-unfashionable and less respectable district of Bloomsbury.

It seemed as if the house and family which had lived in it, thrown together as they were by so many deaths, so many emotions, so many traditions, must endure forever. And then suddenly in one night both vanished.

Virginia Woolf

Enjoying their new-found independence - at odds with a strict and restrictive Victorian upbringing - the young Stephens opened up their Bloomsbury home to friends, and in 1905, Thoby, an alumnus of Trinity College, Cambridge, began the Thursday Club - a space for his university friends to engage in intellectual and philosophical discussion.

Early members of the club included Lytton Strachey, Clive Bell, and Leonard Woolf - and some were members of the university’s elite semi-secret debating society, The Apostles (also known as the Cambridge Conversazione Society), founded by George Tomlinson, JFD Maurice and John Sterling in the late 1820s. Former members of The Apostles included the poets Alfred Tennyson, Arthur Hallam, and Edward Fitzgerald, and Vanessa and Virginia’s father, Leslie Stephen.

Members of The Apostles in Trinity Gardens (Nineteenth Century), Photographer Unknown

Most group members were also students of G. E. Moore, an important figure in philosophy at the beginning of the twentieth century. Moore became an elected fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1898, where he remained until 1904. In 1903, he published Principia Ethica, a major ethical work in which he argued for the primacy of personal relationships, love, knowledge and aesthetic experience above all else.

Moore at this time was a master of… greeting one’s remarks with a gasp of incredulity - Do you really think that, an expression of face as if to hear such a thing said reduced him to a state of wonder verging on imbecility, with his mouth wide open and wagging his head in the negative so violently that his hair shook. Oh! He would say, goggling at you as if either you or he must be mad; and no reply was possible.

John Maynard Keynes

Leonard Woolf, Clive Bell, Lytton Strachey, E M Forster

With interconnecting attitudes and many shared beliefs, members of the Thursday Club would discuss subjects from art, literature, philosophy, current affairs and even sexual relations. And for Vanessa and Virginia, who had been educated primarily by their parents at home, this freedom of thought and speech was a revelation.

The argument, whether it was about atmosphere or the nature of truth, was always tossed into the middle of the party. Now Hawtrey would say something; now Vanessa; now Saxon; now Clive; now Thoby. It filled me with wonder to watch those who were finally left in the argument piling stone upon stone, cautiously, accurately, long after it had completely soared above my sight. But if one could not say anything, one could listen. One had glimpses of something miraculous happening high up in the air. Often we would still be sitting in a circle at two or three in the morning… One could stumble off to bed feeling that something very important had happened. It had been proved that beauty was - or beauty was not - for I have never been quite sure which - part of a picture.

Virginia Woolf

Later that same year, Vanessa founded the Friday Club - a group devoted to discussing and appreciating art - and invited her artist friends from the Royal Academy and the Slade School, who Roger Fry and Duncan Grant eventually joined. Soon after its formation, she began searching for exhibition venues, but in a 1905 letter to Clive Bell, she explains why, like the Thursday Club, they too gathered at 46 Gordon Square.

The chief one seems to me to be that, as you say, we should have to eradicate politeness. We can get to the point of calling each other prigs and adulterers quite happily when the company is small & select, but its rather a question whether we could do it with a larger number of people who might not feel that they were quite on neutral ground.

It has been more than one hundred years since the Thursday Club and Friday Club began to meet in a drawing room at 46 Gordon Square, but with the ideas debated at these gatherings becoming the foundation for future important work, the influence of these two clubs remains. The writing of Virginia Woolf is still studied extensively, the novels of E.M. Forster are still adapted for screen and stage, and the importance of Roger Fry, Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell’s contribution to British art is still written about and discussed.

These Thursday evening parties were, as far as I am concerned, the germ from which sprang all that has since come to be called - in newspapers, in novels, in Germany, in France - even, I daresay, in Turkey and Timbuktu - by the name of Bloomsbury.

Virginia Woolf

Thank you for reading! If you enjoyed this biography, please like and/or share. And, as always, I would love to know your thoughts in the comments. If you wish, you can also Become a Member and/or read the suggested Beyond Bloomsbury posts below. Until next time…

The Bloomsbury Artists: Painting in Circles

Virginia Woolf: The Mark on the Wall

Virginia Woolf: "Jane Eyre" and "Wuthering Heights"

Virginia Woolf: An Unwritten Novel

Images:

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Sources and Recommended Reading:

ed. Bell, Anne Olivier, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Volumes I-V (Penguin, 1979)

Bell, Quentin, Bloomsbury Recalled (Columbia University Press, 1995)

Bell, Quentin, Virginia Woolf: A Biography (Pimlico, 1996)

ed. Giachero, Lia, Vanessa Bell: Sketches in Pen and Ink (Pimlico, 1997)

Marler, Regina, ed., Selected Letters of Vanessa Bell (Bloomsbury Publishing, 1993)

ed. Nicolson, Nigel, The Letters of Virginia Woolf. Volumes 1-6 (Harcourt, 1975)

ed. Rosner, Victoria, The Cambridge Companion to The Bloomsbury Group (2014)

ed. Ryan, Derek & Ross, Stephen, The Handbook to The Bloomsbury Group (Bloomsbury Academic, 2018)

Spalding, Frances, Duncan Grant: A Biography (Vintage, 1998)

Spalding, Frances, Roger Fry: Art and Life (Black Dog Books, 1999)

Spalding, Frances, Vanessa Bell: Portrait of the Bloomsbury Artist (Barbara Ward & Associates, 2018)

Woolf, Leonard, Sowing: An Autobiography of the Years 1880-1904 (Mariner Books, 1964)