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writers, artists, bohemians – literature and the arts 1900-1950

writers, artists, bohemians - literature and the arts 1900-1950

Virginia Woolf and the Arts

August 1, 2010 by Roy Johnson

essays in literary, media, and cultural studies

As editor Maggie Humm points out in her introduction to this huge collection of scholarly studies on Virginia Woolf and the Arts, Woolf spent her entire life surrounded by creative people of all kinds. Her father was an internationally renowned writer (on belle lettres and moutaineering), her sister was a painter, and her friend Roger Fry both a critic and an artist. Virginia Woolf visited contemporary exhibitions, travelled to museums abroad, and participated in aesthetic debates via her prolific output of essays and journalism.

Virginia Woolf and the ArtsThe essays are grouped under headings of Aesthetic Theory, Painting, Domestic Arts, Publishing, Broadcasting and Technology, Visual Media, and Performance Arts. At their best they illuminate the fact that Virginia Woolf had original opinions and novel forms of expressing them on a variety of subjects, ranging from human behaviour to painting, urban and domestic life, social history, and the relationship between memory, consciousness, and time.

They cover topics such as Woolf’s depiction of aesthetic creation via painting (To the Lighthouse), Woolf and race [without touching on her anti-Semitism], Woolf and the metropolitan city, and Woolf and realism. Each essay is self-contained, with its own set of endnotes and bibliography of further reading.

At their worst (particularly those dealing with aesthetics and literary theory) they are little more than overblown meditations, dragging apparent meanings out of words (more/Moor/moor) where quite clearly none were intended – like schoolboy puns. They also indulge in settling of scores with other ‘critics’, rather than focusing on authentic literary criticism.

Fortunately, the collection improves as it progresses. The most interesting and effective essays are the least pretentious and the least to do with modern literary criticism in all its silliness. For instance Diane Gillespie on ‘Virginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell, and Painting’ and Benjamin Harvey on Woolf’s visits to art galleries and museums.

Though even amongst the sensible essays there are disappointments. A chapter on ‘Bohemian Lifestyles’ is not much more than a description of Woolf’s relationships with her sister Vanessa, Vita Sackville-West, and Katherine Mansfield. It doesn’t explore any truly radical behaviour – such as Vanessa’s ability to live comfortably alongside her ex-husband and his lover, her own ex-lover and his current (gay) lover, and to conceal from her own daughter the true identity of her father for almost twenty years.

But there are plenty of good chapters – one on ‘Virginia Woolf and Entertaining’, another on Woolf’s sesitivity to gardens, and an especially interesting study of ‘Virginia Woolf as Publisher and Editor’ which spills over quite creatively into the Hogarth Press promotion of Russian Literature.

This leads logically enough into a chapter on ‘Virginia Woolf and Book Design’ which is like a shortened version of John Willis’s full length study Leonard and Viginia Woolf as Publishers: The Hogarth Press 1917-1941. Patrick Collier has a good chapter on Woolf and journalism, which I wish had included consideration of her early reviews for the Manchester Guardian and The Times Literary Supplement in the period 1904-1915.

Pamela Caughie also has an interesting chapter on Virginia Woolf and radio broadcasting that cleverly points out the contradictions in Woolf’s attitude to the BBC – keen to embrace the new technology it offered in the 1920s, but perceptive enough to realise that its early Reithean paternalism was hopelessly middlebrow – a view she shared with her husband Leonard, who put his finger on an attitude which is still prevelent today:

That the BBC should be so reactionary and politically and intellectually dishonest is what one would expect … knowing the kind of people who always get in control of those kind of machines, but what makes them so contemptible is that, even according to their own servants’ hall standards, they habitually choose the tenth rate in everything, from their music hall programmes and social lickspittlers and royal bumsuckers right down their scale to the singers of Schubert songs, the conductors of their classical concerts and the writers of their reviews.

The essays at the latter end of the collection remind us just how au courant Virginia Woolf was with contemporary technology. She took photographs, broadcasted on the radio, and wrote about London’s underground, the telephone, the cinema, and even flying (without having done so). The irony here is that the critics explaining her avant-garde behaviour and interests are themselves locked into a mode that is terminally old-fashioned (the academic essay) almost to the point of being moribund.

This is a huge and very impressive production, but one thing struck me about it – apart from its equally huge cost. Many of the essays take a long time to make a simple point. They circle around the object of enquiry with endless qualifications and even self-refutations, all made in the spirit of ‘interrogating’ their subject. It’s as if we are being offered ‘thinking aloud’ instead of considered arguments and conclusions. Having said that, the audience at which this Woolf-fest is aimed (lecturers and post-graduates) will not want to miss out on a collection that does include studies that link Woolf to many other forms of culture beyond literature alone.

Virginia Woolf and the Arts Buy the book at Amazon UK

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© Roy Johnson 2010


Maggie Humm (ed), The Edinburgh Companion to Virginia Woolf and the Arts, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010, pp.512, ISBN: 0748635521


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Virginia Woolf and the Politics of Language

July 27, 2010 by Roy Johnson

Woolf as essayist, feminist, and anti-militarist

The Virgina Woolf industry continues at full capacity on both sides of the Atlantic, and this slim monograph Virginia Woolf and the Politics of Language comes to us from the University of Pennsylvania, courtesy of Edinburgh University Press. Using the link between Virginia Woolf and Montaigne as essayists for her springboard, Judith Allen uses it as an excuse to write about contemporary political concerns, ranging from ‘extraordinary rendition’ and ‘collateral damage’, to ‘Abu Ghraib’ and anything else on the spectrum of abuses which have been the subject of lies, propaganda and deception by the press and the political class. One applauds the political sentiments of course, but one often searches in vain for a connection with Virginia Woolf.

Virginia Woolf and the Politics of LanguageHer basic argument is that the essay is an exploration of a topic or an idea, and because it looks at issues from a variety of perspectives, it is the enemy of totalising theories and systems. That seems quite reasonable, and it is true that both Woolf and Montaigne use the essay forms as a means of opening up and exploring ideas, comparing one thing with another, and discovering unexpected links between the past and the present.

The only other coherent argument that emerges is that Virginia Woolf uses images and metaphors of growth, change, flux, and mutability in her work – which Allen assumes are feminine strategies of writing, deliberately designed to challenge a masculine attempt to establish stasis, fixity, and permanence. This too might be a persuasive argument if it were supported by more in the way of evidence.

The problem is that her presentation suffers from some of the common weaknesses of academic writing produced to gain status or tenure – over-reliance on quotations from other fashionable academic writers, raising questions that masquerade as insights, and excessive signposting (‘this chapter wil look at …’). No sooner is a proposition launched than it is called cautiously into question. This is offered as a critical dialectic when it is not much more than a form of thinking aloud. There is also the bizarre practice of signposting the intention to consider a topic which is already under consideration. This represents a failure to control structure for which even an undergraduate essay would be marked down. She is also not averse to self-congratulatory asides:

Although no one has made any direct link between Bakhtin and Montaigne’s writings, Bakhtin’s dissertation on Rabelais, one of Montaigne’s contemporaries, entitled Rabelais and the World, quotes several of Montaigne’s essays, and my examination of their ideas regarding the relationship between reader and writer is quite illuminating

The discussion ranges from one essay to another, from essay to novel, from one critic to another critic’s view of the first and back again. The critics engaged to support her arguments are what might be called the usual suspects – Bakhtin, Deleuze, and Guattari. And the whole production has about it the spirit of a composition with one primary motivating factor – the quest for academic promotion. In terms of its style, nothing could be further from the clarity, simplicity, and authenticity of the writers she is discussing – Woolf and Montaigne.

A whole chapter is devoted to the fact that Woolf often changed the titles of her works, with accompanying large claims made for the significance of this practice – ignoring the fact that many writers do the same thing.

Judith Allen also has a curious habit of referring to the ‘narrators’ of Woolf’s essays, when there is in fact little or no evidence to support the notion of a fictional construct. The essays come to us quite simply as the thoughts and writing of Woolf herself. Her opinions are often offered in a playful, oblique, and metaphoric manner – but that’s her style: there is no constructed intermediary delivering her opinions.

The last parts of the book are largely devoted to a critique of US and UK policy in the war on Iraq. However much one might share her sentiments on this barbaric, illegal, and counter-productive invasion, they tell us nothing about Virginia Woolf except that she was a vehement critic of imperialism and also a pacifist – something I think we already knew.

Virginia Woolf and the Politics of Language Buy the book at Amazon UK

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© Roy Johnson 2010


Judith Allen, Virginia Woolf and the Politics of Language, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010, pp.133, ISBN: 0748636757


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Virginia Woolf illustrated biography

July 3, 2009 by Roy Johnson

an introduction to her life and work

This is a best-selling book from Thames and Hudson. It’s slim, cheap, and you might almost say a little old fashioned – yet it goes on being popular year after year. And it’s easy to see why. The text is written by John Lehmann who actually worked for Virginia Woolf and her husband Leonard at the Hogarth Press. Indeed, at one time he even wanted to take it over and run it on fully professional lines – something which Leonard quite rightly resisted, arguing that it’s strength lay in its independence. But the real delight the book offers is a wonderful collection of pictures of Woolf and her friends who were part of the Bloomsbury Group.

Virginia Woolf illustrated biographyMore than that, it combines a lightness of touch in presenting Woolf’s biography with a very engaging introduction to each of her major works. Lehmann follows the story of Woolf’s life and her social background – an upper-middle class milieu with artistic and literary connections (Henry James was a friend of the family) self-educated in her father Leslie Stephen’s library, falling in love with other women, and then the establishment of the Bloomsbury group in Gordon Square with her brother Thoby and his Cambridge friends John Maynard Keynes and Lytton Strachey.

She began her literary career, then married Leonard Woolf, who looked after her patiently through all her periods of mental and physical illness. As therapeutic activity, he even bought a printing machine which enabled them both to set up the Hogarth Press – which went on to become very successful.

Lehmann traces her literary development, from the conventional approach of The Voyage Out and Night and Day, to the artistic breakthroughs of Jacob’s Room and Mrs Dalloway, so his biography also provides and intelligent guide to her writing as well as her life.

Despite being a close personal friend of both Virginia and Leonard, he doesn’t shy away from the love-affair she had with Vita Sackville-West, linking it perceptively to his account of Orlando, which it inspired. Then his transition via A Room of One’s Own to The Waves traces her intellectual development as both a feminist and a novelist. His account of The Waves will help anyone who needs preparation for an attempt at what is quite a difficult novel.

Lehmann, rather like Leonard Woolf, thinks Three Guineas is not one of her best non-fiction works – an opinion I don’t think many people would agree with today. But the remainder of his explications and judgements are really helpful for anybody who wants to understand her work.

However, the real delight of the book is the photographs which range from her early through to her late life. They include portrait paintings, sketches made by artists such as Roger Fry and her sister Vanessa Bell, book jacket designs, and pictures of the houses where she lived and wrote.

© Roy Johnson 2000

Virginia Woolf illustrated biography Buy the book at Amazon UK

Virginia Woolf illustrated biography Buy the book at Amazon US


John Lehmann, Virginia Woolf, London: Thames and Hudson, 1987, pp.128, ISBN 0500260265


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Virginia Woolf life and works

September 24, 2009 by Roy Johnson

novelist, essayist, diarist, biographer

Virginia Woolf life and works1882. Virginia Woolf born (25 Jan) Adeline Virginia Stephen, third child of Leslie Stephen (Victorian man of letters – first editor of the Dictionary of National Biography) – and Julia Duckworth (of the Duckworth publishing family). Comfortable upper middle class family background. Her father had previously been married to the daughter of the novelist William Makepeace Thackery. Brothers Thoby and Adrian went to Cambridge, and her sister Vanessa became a painter. Virginia was educated by private tutors and by extensive reading of literary classics in her father’s library.

1895. Death of her mother Julia Stephen. VW has the first of many nervous breakdowns.

1896. Travels in France with her sister Vanessa.

1897. Death of half-sister, Stella. VW learning Greek and History at King’s College London.

1899. Brother Thoby Stephen enters Trinity College, Cambridge and subsequently meets Lytton Strachey, Leonard Woolf, and Clive Bell. These Cambridge friends subsequently become known as the Bloomsbury Group, of which VW was an important and influential member.

1904. Death of father. Beginning of second serious breakdown. VW’s first publication is an unsigned review in The Guardian. Travels in France and Italy with her sister Vanessa and her friend Violet Dickinson. VW moves to Gordon Square in Bloomsbury. Other residents of this Square include Lady Jane Strachey, Charlotte Mew, and Dora Carrington.

1905. Travels in Spain and Portugal. Writes book reviews and teaches once a week at Morley College, London, an evening institute for working men and women.

1906. Travels in Greece. Death of brother Thoby Stephen. Writes a group of short stories now collected as Memoirs of a Novelist.

1907. Marriage of sister Vanessa to Clive Bell. VW moves with brother Adrian to live in Fitzroy Square. Working on her first novel (to become The Voyage Out).

1908. Visits Italy with the Bells.

1909. Lytton Strachey [homosexual] proposes marriage. VW meets Ottoline Morell, visits Bayreuth and Florence.


Virginia Woolf: BiographyVirginia Woolf is a readable and well illustrated biography by John Lehmann, who at one point worked as her assistant at the Hogarth Press. It is described by the blurb as ‘A critical biography of Virginia Woolf containing illustrations that are a record of the Bloomsbury Group and the literary and artistic world that surrounded a writer who is immensely popular today’. An attractive and very accessible introduction to the subject.
Virginia Woolf - A Biography Buy the book here


1910. Works for women’s suffrage. Spends time in a nursing home in Twickenham. First exhibition of Post-Impressionist painters arranged by Roger Fry.

1911. VW moves to Brunswick Square, sharing house with brother Adrian, Maynard Keynes, Duncan Grant, and Leonard Woolf. Travels to Turkey.

1912. Marries Leonard Woolf. Travels for honeymoon to Provence, Spain, and Italy. Moves to Clifford’s Inn.

1913. Mental illness and her first attempted suicide. Put in care of husband and nurses.

1915. Purchase of Hogarth House, Richmond. The Voyage Out published and well received. Another bout of violent madness.

1916. Lectures to Richmond branch of the Women’s Co-Operative Guild. regular work for the Times Literary Supplement [whose reviews were at that time anonymous].

1917. L and VW buy hand printing machine and establish the Hogarth Press. First publication Monday or Tuesday. Later goes on to publish T.S. Eliot, Freud, and VW’s own books.

1919. Purchase of Monk’s House, Rodmell. Night and Day published. Brief friendship with Katherine Mansfield. Both are conscious of experimenting with the substance and the style of prose fiction.

1920. Works on journalism and Jacob’s Room.


The Cambridge Companion to Virginia WoolfThe Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf is collection of essays which addresses the full range of her intellectual perspectives – literary, artistic, philosophical and political. It provides new readings of all nine novels and fresh insight into Woolf’s letters, diaries and essays. The progress of Woolf’s thinking is revealed from Bloomsbury aestheticism through her hatred of censorship, corruption and hierarchy to her concern with all aspects of modernism.


1921. The Mark on the Wall published. VW ill for most of the summer.

1922. Jacob’s Room published. MeetsVita Sackville-West with whom she has a brief love affair. Writing encouraged by E.M. Forster, Strachey, and Leonard Woolf.

1923. Visits Spain. Works on ‘The Hours’ – an early version of Mrs Dalloway.

1924. Purchase of lease on house in Tavistock Square. Gives lecture that becomes ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’.

1925. The Common Reader [essays] and Mrs Dalloway published. Major break with the traditional novel, its form and techniques.

1926. Unwell with German measles. Starts writing To the Lighthouse.

1927. To the Lighthouse published. Travels to France and Sicily. Begins Orlando.

1928. Orlando published – a fantasy dedicated to and based upon the life of Vita Sackville-West and her love of her ancestral home at Knole in Kent. Delivers lectures at Cambridge on which she based A Room of One’s Own.

1929. A Room of One’s Own published – essays on women’s exclusion from literary history which have become of seminal importance in feminist studies. Travels to Berlin.

1930. First meets Ethel Smyth – pipe-smoking feminist composer, who falls in love with VW. Finishes first version of The Waves.

1931. The Waves – a novel composed of the thoughts of six characters which takes VW’s literary experimentation to its natural limits.

1932. Death of Lytton Strachey. Begins ‘The Partigers’ which was to become The Years.

1934. Death of Roger Fry. Rewrites The Years.

1935. Rewrites The Years. Car tour through Holland, Germany, and Italy.

1936. Begins Three Guineas – a ‘sequel’ to A Room of One’s Own.

1938. Three Guineas extends the feminist critique of patriarchy, militarism, and privilege started in A Room of One’s Own.

1939. Moves to Mecklenburgh Square, but lives mainly at Monk’s House. Meets Freud in London.

1940. Biography of Roger Fry published. London homes damaged or destroyed in blitz.

1941. VW completes Between the Acts, her last novel, then fearing the madness which she felt engulfing her again, fills her pockets with stones and drowns herself in the River Ouse, near Monk’s House. [Her dates of 1882- 1941 are exactly those of James Joyce.]


Bloomsbury Group – web links

Bloomsbury Group - web links Hogarth Press first editions
Annotated gallery of original first edition book jacket covers from the Hogarth Press, featuring designs by Vanessa Bell, Roger Fry, and others.

Bloomsbury Group - web links The Omega Workshops
A brief history of Roger Fry’s experimental Omega Workshops, which had a lasting influence on interior design in post First World War Britain.

Bloomsbury Group - web links The Bloomsbury Group and War
An essay on the largely pacifist and internationalist stance taken by Bloomsbury Group members towards the First World War.

Bloomsbury Group web links Tate Gallery Archive Journeys: Bloomsbury
Mini web site featuring photos, paintings, a timeline, sub-sections on the Omega Workshops, Roger Fry, and Duncan Grant, and biographical notes.

Bloomsbury Group - web links Bloomsbury: Books, Art and Design
Exhibition of paintings, designs, and ceramics at Toronto University featuring Hogarth Press, Vanessa Bell, Dora Carrington, Quentin Bell, and Stephen Tomlin.

Bloomsbury Group - web links Blogging Woolf
A rich enthusiast site featuring news of events, exhibitions, new book reviews, relevant links, study resources, and anything related to Bloomsbury and Virginia Woolf

Bloomsbury Group - web links Hyper-Concordance to Virginia Woolf
Search the texts of all Woolf’s major works, and track down phrases, quotes, and even individual words in their original context.

Bloomsbury Group - web links A Mrs Dalloway Walk in London
An annotated description of Clarissa Dalloway’s walk from Westminster to Regent’s Park, with historical updates and a bibliography.

Bloomsbury Group - web links Women’s History Walk in Bloomsbury
Annotated tour of literary and political homes in Bloomsbury, including Gordon Square, University College, Bedford Square, Doughty Street, and Tavistock Square.

Bloomsbury Group - web links Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain
News of events, regular bulletins, study materials, publications, and related links. Largely the work of Virginia Woolf specialist Stuart N. Clarke.

Bloomsbury Group - web links BBC Audio Essay – A Eulogy to Words
A charming sound recording of a BBC radio talk broadcast in 1937 – accompanied by a slideshow of photographs of Virginia Woolf.

Bloomsbury Group - web links A Family Photograph Albumn
Leslie Stephens’ collection of family photographs which became known as the Mausoleum Book, collected at Smith College – Massachusetts.

Bloomsbury Group - web links Bloomsbury at Duke University
A collection of book jacket covers, Fry’s Twelve Woodcuts, Strachey’s ‘Elizabeth and Essex’.

© Roy Johnson 2000-2014


More on Virginia Woolf
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Filed Under: Bloomsbury Group, Virginia Woolf Tagged With: Biography, Bloomsbury Group, Literary studies, Modernism, Virginia Woolf, Virginia Woolf biography

Virginia Woolf’s Women

July 24, 2014 by Roy Johnson

biographical studies of major figures in her life

Virginia Woolf’s Women is a study of the principal females in Virginia Woolf’s life and the influences they may have had in shaping her views of the world. It begins naturally enough in her early home life. Vanessa Curtis argues that Virginia Woolf inherited suffering, illness, and self-deprecation from her grandmother Mia and her mother Julia Stephen whose saintly beauty was cut short by an early death when Woolf was only thirteen. In this environment she also had direct personal contact with the concept of ‘the angel of the house’ against which she was later to argue. Its author Coventry Patmore was a visitor to the house as a friend of her grandmother.

Virginia Woolf's Women

Julia Stephen

Following Julia’s death, Woolf’s older step-sister Stella Duckworth became a surrogate mother to the seven children of the Stephen family. But no sooner was she established in this role than two events snatched away her comforting presence – first her marriage to Jack Hills, and then immediately following the honeymoon, her sudden death.

Curtis traces echoes of these events in The Voyage Out and Night and Day and even the much later To the Lighthouse. Of course it is legitimate to see elements of biography expressed in the fiction – but it is not a legitimate practice to read back from fiction as a valid source of biographical information. More legitimately, Curtis attributes Woolf’s scepticism about the prospects of successful heterosexual love to this trio of family martyrs.

The next major figure is her elder sister Vanessa (Bell), who took over from Stella as head of the household. The two sisters had a very close relationship, yet one which occasionally spilled over into rivalry. Vanessa was a liberating factor in organising the family’s move from Kensington to Bloomsbury after their father’s death. She also remained closely alongside Virginia when she sank into periods of depression and near-madness.

The two sisters established weekend homes near each other in Rodmell and Charleston in East Sussex, and they shared a common circle of friends amongst the various members of the Bloomsbury Group. The roles of care-giver and invalid were only ever reversed on the occasion of Vanessa’s collapse when her son Julian was killed in the Spanish Civil War in 1937.

Even Bloomsbury enthusiasts might not recognise the importance in Woolf’s life of the next figure – Violet Dickinson – a six foot tall upper class woman (seventeen years older) who was a lifelong supporter and Woolf enthusiast. It was Dickinson who first introduced her to newspaper and magazine editors – which enabled her to establish herself as a reviewer and a journalist.

Curtis speculates about the exact nature of the relationship between the two women, her uncertainty reflected in the fact that she calls it Woolf’s “first emotional and physical love” whilst admitting that there is no evidence of any physical connection between them. Her summing up is probably more accurate – a ‘warm-up’ for the later relationship with Vita Sackville-West.

Woolf’s relationship with Ottoline Morrell does not reflect well on her in terms of sincerity, or moral integrity. Like many of the other artists and writers who accepted Morrell’s generous hospitality at Garsington Manor, she repaid it by scoffing and making fun of the hostess behind her back.

He relationship with Katherine Mansfield was of a different order. The two writers circled round each other, both of them aware that they were literary rivals, yet respectful of each other’s work. They chose similar topics to write about, and for a while even had similar literary styles. They shared a profound scepticism about heterosexual males, and both wrote cautious tales of Sapphic desire. Following Katherine Mansfield’s early death in 1923, Woolf expressed the wish that she had been closer to her rival.

Virginia Woolf's Women

Dora Carrington

A whole chapter on Dora Carrington fails to establish any significant influence on Woolf herself, despite uncovering many similarities between them as creative artists. The two women were simply rivals for the friendship of Lytton Strachey, to whom they were both attached – and Carrington won hands down on that attachment, for which she paid with her life.

Curtis has more success, understandably, with Vita Sackville-West. The history and nature of their affair is well known – an affair facilitated by the fact that neither of them had sexual relationships with their own husbands. There is a detailed tracing of the ups and downs of the emotional tensions between them, but the account ignores opportunities to consider any possible mutual influence as writers.

This is a loss, because at the time their relationship, Sackville-West was at the height of her fame as a writer, and she was actually published by Virginia and Leonard Woolf at the Hogarth Press. But by way of compensation Curtis does acknowledge and discuss Vita’s significance as the inspiration for Orlando.

Virginia Woolf's Women

Virginia Woolf with Ethyl Smyth

The most extraordinary figure is saved for last. Ethyl Smyth was a pipe-smoking lesbian feminist composer, who by the time she met Woolf was seventy-three years old, stone deaf, and sporting an enormous ear-trumpet. Nevertheless, she fell in love with the much younger writer, and although this feeling was only weakly reciprocated Curtis makes a reasonable case for her influence on Woolf’s work as a writer.

The first influences were Smyth’s radical feminism, her support for the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) and her struggles to find acceptance as a female creative artist in a musical world which was dominated by men (as it still is). Curtis points out that these topics, which Woolf discussed with Smyth, found their way directly into the bombshell polemic Three Guineas. And the other influence was that Woolf introduced musical notions of composition and form, particularly into her later works.

There are no surprise revelations in these studies: most of the information will be well known to Bloomsbury enthusiasts, and Woolf’s life has been worked over thoroughly by any number of biographists. But as a general introduction to the social and intellectual milieu of the period it’s an excellent piece of work, well illustrated, and supported by a full scale critical apparatus.

Virginia Woolf's Women Buy the book at Amazon UK
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© Roy Johnson 2014


Vanessa Curtis, Virginia Woolf’s Women, London: Robert Hale, 2002, pp.224, ISBN: B00KXX3TCU


More on Virginia Woolf
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Filed Under: Bloomsbury Group, Virginia Woolf Tagged With: Biography, Bloomsbury Group, Cultural history, English literature, Literary studies, Virginia Woolf

Vita and Harold

July 11, 2009 by Roy Johnson

The letters of Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson

Harold Nicolson was a diplomat, a writer, and a politician, but he is best known for being married to Vita Sackville-West. They were both fringe members of the Bloomsbury Group. She too was a writer – indeed a best-selling author in the 1930s – but is best known as the woman who fell in love with and ran away with Virginia Woolf. Collectively, she and her husband are also best known for their rather unusual marriage and its arrangements which permitted them both to have lovers of the same sex whilst swearing their undying loyalty to each other. All this is recorded by their son in the equally famous account Portrait of a Marriage. Vita and Harold is a selection from their personal correspondence.

Vita & HaroldThey wrote to each other voluminously (10,500 letters) throughout their long relationship – mainly because so much of it was spent apart. He worked in Persia whilst she stayed at home. Later, he had his rooms in Albany where he lived all week: she stayed in Sissinghurst writing and tending their gardens. The children were kept out of the way, and they met at weekends. In the meantime homosexual affairs flourished and they wrote to say how much they were missing each other.

The early letters are very playful and, it has to be said, full of the protestations of a deep friendship based on shared interests and understanding on which they later claimed the success of their marriage was built.

She is very understanding when he contracts a venereal infection from another male guest at a weekend party he attended with her as his new wife. He is more concerned but ultimately forgiving when she leaves him and their two children to ‘elope’ with Violet Keppel, who had just married Denys Trefusis.

She even writes to him from the south of France whilst he is attending the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 – complaining that the exchange rate had dropped before she could convert her pounds sterling. He was negotiating the terms of the Armistice, whilst she was getting ready to gamble away her money in Monte Carlo.

It’s an interesting lesson in how letters must be put into a historical and cultural context in order to be properly understood. Vita writes a letter declaring undying love for her husband – but you would never guess it was written on the very day that she went off for the last time with Violet Trefusis.

Although Vita was the more successful author, his letters are more entertaining – at moments given to (unintentional?) humour:

[On horticulture] Shrubbery is a great problem if one is to avoid the suburban…[On his younger son] I said that about masturbation he must put it off as long as he possibly could – and that then he must only do it on Saturdays…[On education] I said that co-education was calculated to make boys homosexual for life, whereas Eton was only calculated to make them homosexual until 23 or 24.

Vita on the other hand is often more philosophically reflective, even if her observations are laced with a breathtaking notions of superiority:

The whole system of marriage is wrong. It ought, at least, to be optional and no stigma attached if you prefer a less claustrophobic form of contact. For it is claustrophobic. It is only very, very intelligent people like us who are able to rise superior; and I have a suspicion, my darling, that even our intelligence…wouldn’t have sufficed if our temperamental weaknesses didn’t happen to dovetail as well as they do…In fact our common determination for personal liberty: to have it ourselves, and to allow it to each other.

Serene detachment and au-dessus de la mêlée – yet this is the woman who travelled all the way to Paris to seduce Violet Trefusis whilst she was on her honeymoon, and forebad her to have any sexual relationship with her new husband Denys.

It’s amazing how many important political events Harold was connected with. He was the only person to be present at the settlement of both world wars. And he knew just about everyone who was anyone. In the course of his busy life he hobnobs with James Joyce, Somerset Maugham, Winston Churchill, the Duke of Windsor, and Charles de Gaulle.

No doubt there are today people with unconventional marriages, bisexual relations, connections in high places, and lots of money – but this one offers a glimpse of a world which has gone by. And I somehow doubt that people in future will be reading the emails and text messages which have replaced the written letter as a means of communication.

© Roy Johnson 2001

Vita and Harold   Buy the book at Amazon UK

Vita and Harold   Buy the book at Amazon US


Nigel Nicolson (ed), Vita & Harold: The Letters of Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson 1910-1962, London: Phoenix, 1993, pp.452, ISBN: 1857990617


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Vita Sackville-West biography

September 21, 2009 by Roy Johnson

best-selling novelist, lesbian, and horticulturalist

Vita Sackville-West biographyVita (Victoria Mary) Sackville-West (1892-1962) was a prolific poet and novelist – though she is probably best known for her writing on gardens and her affair with Virginia Woolf. She was born into an aristocratic family in Knole, Kent. Her grandmother was the famous Pepita, a Spanish dancer of humble descent who had formed an illicit union with Lionel Sackville-West, the 2nd Lord Sackville. She was educated privately and became a striking if slightly eccentric figure, over six feet tall. As a child she started to write poetry, writing her first ballads at the age of 11. Her first published work, the verse drama Chatterton, was printed privately in 1909 when she was seventeen, and besides further volumes of poetry she wrote thirteen full-length novels (including a detective story) as well as books on biography, and history.

In 1913 she married the diplomat and critic Harold Nicolson, with whom she lived briefly in Persia and then at Sissinghurst Castle in Kent. They had two children, who became the art critic Benedict Nicolson and the publisher Nigel Nicolson. At first she played her role as a dutiful wife, but then her husband admitted that he had a male lover. The marriage survived nevertheless.

She herself caused something of a scandal by having a very public affair with Violet Keppel, the daughter of Alice Keppel, Edward VII’s mistress. Their affair continued even after Violet married and became Violet Trefusis in 1919. It reached a climax when the two women ‘eloped’ to Paris. Their husbands Denys Trefusis and Harold Nicolson chartered an aeroplane and travelled to Paris together to persuade their wives to return home.

Vita fictionalised the episode in her novel Challenge, with Julian representing Vita Sackville-West. The book was thought at the time to be so sensational and provocative that it was suppressed in Britain by both Vita’s and Violet’s parents, who feared an explosive scandal. It was, however, accepted in America, and published there in 1923.

That same year the art critic Clive Bell introduced Sackville-West to Virginia Woolf, and the two became lovers, travelling to France and Italy on holiday together the following year. Much of this relationship is recorded in the voluminous exchange of letters between these two formidable women. Woolf used Vita as the model for the central figure in her novel Orlando, and indeed early editions of the book carried pictures of Vita in costumes appropriate to the story.

Vita also had affairs with Hilda Matheson, head of the BBC Talks Department, and Mary Campbell, married to the poet Roy Campbell. Vita’s father died in 1928 and his brother became the fourth Baron Sackville-West, inheriting Knole.

This was a terrible though inevitable blow to Vita. She was passionately attached to the family seat and the long tradition that it represented, but she knew that as a female offspring she could not inherit. Interestingly, in a letter to her husband she described her attachment to the building in terms of a lesbianism which directly recalls her behaviour towards Violet Trefusis:

My voluntary exile from Knole is very curious. I think about it a lot. I feel exactly as though I had had for years a liaison with a beautiful woman, who never, from force of circumstances, belonged to me wholly; but who had for me a sort of half-maternal tenderness and understanding, in which I could be entirely happy. Now I feel as though we had been parted because (again through force of circumstances and owing to no choice of her own) she had been compelled to marry someone else and had momentarily fallen completely beneath his jurisdiction, not happy in it, but acquiescent. I look at her from far off; and if I were wilder and more ruthless towards myself I should burst in one evening and surprise her in the midst of her new domesticity. But life has taught me not to do these things.

In 1929 her husband decided to resign from the foreign service and devote himself to writing and politics. They purchased Sissinghurst Castle, a near-derelict house, and started to restore it. The garden was designed from scratch and copiously stocked with plants by Vita and Harold themselves. Sissinghurst is now a tourist attraction, having been transferred to the National Trust.

In the 1930s she published The Edwardians (1930), All Passion Spent (1931), and Family History (1932) which portrayed English upper-class manners and life. All these books were published by the Hogarth Press (which was run by Leonard Woolf) and all of them became bestsellers. It might seem slightly surprising to us in the twenty-first century to realise that her books were much more popular than Virginia Woolf’s during the latter’s lifetime.

She recorded her own feelings about the relationship between person and place in The Land (1926) – a pastoral poem of 2,500 lines which was awarded the Hawthornden Prize and brought her the literary prestige for which she had long yearned.

This success inspired her to write a companion piece called The Garden. This was not completed and published until after the war, in 1946. She thought the poem ‘not a patch on The Land‘, but many people now see it as a finer work altogether. It won the Heinemann prize, and she spent the whole £100 prize money on azaleas for the garden.

Vita Sackville-WestAfter the war she became something of a recluse, devoting herself to gardening and writing. Her classic English Country Houses records her passionate interest the history of the English country house from the Middle Ages to the 20th century, and of the people who built and lived in them from common squires to kings and queens. Much of this was fuelled by her passionate attachment to Knole, which she had not inherited.

Her interest in gardening was rewarded in 1955 by the Royal Horticultural Society. She also wrote a regular gardening column at the Observer from 1946. That year she was also made a Companion of Honour for her services to literature. In the latter years of her life she lived rather reclusively, and devoted herself largely to her gardens and home. She died of cancer on June 2, 1962. Harold Nicolson died six years later.

Vita’s son Benedict eventually found out about his mother’s (and his father’s) dual sexual nature when he was informed of it bluntly at the age of eighteen by his grandmother. Portrait of a Marriage by Nigel Nicolson (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1973) gives the full story of this period of the Nicolsons’ lives, taken from an autobiographical manuscript found in a locked briefcase after Vita’s death (which he cut open with a knife).


Vita Sackville-West biography


Bloomsbury Group – web links

Bloomsbury Group - web links Hogarth Press first editions
Annotated gallery of original first edition book jacket covers from the Hogarth Press, featuring designs by Vanessa Bell, Roger Fry, and others.

Bloomsbury Group - web links The Omega Workshops
A brief history of Roger Fry’s experimental Omega Workshops, which had a lasting influence on interior design in post First World War Britain.

Bloomsbury Group - web links The Bloomsbury Group and War
An essay on the largely pacifist and internationalist stance taken by Bloomsbury Group members towards the First World War.

Bloomsbury Group web links Tate Gallery Archive Journeys: Bloomsbury
Mini web site featuring photos, paintings, a timeline, sub-sections on the Omega Workshops, Roger Fry, and Duncan Grant, and biographical notes.

Bloomsbury Group - web links Bloomsbury: Books, Art and Design
Exhibition of paintings, designs, and ceramics at Toronto University featuring Hogarth Press, Vanessa Bell, Dora Carrington, Quentin Bell, and Stephen Tomlin.

Bloomsbury Group - web links Blogging Woolf
A rich enthusiast site featuring news of events, exhibitions, new book reviews, relevant links, study resources, and anything related to Bloomsbury and Virginia Woolf

Bloomsbury Group - web links Hyper-Concordance to Virginia Woolf
Search the texts of all Woolf’s major works, and track down phrases, quotes, and even individual words in their original context.

Bloomsbury Group - web links A Mrs Dalloway Walk in London
An annotated description of Clarissa Dalloway’s walk from Westminster to Regent’s Park, with historical updates and a bibliography.

Bloomsbury Group - web links Women’s History Walk in Bloomsbury
Annotated tour of literary and political homes in Bloomsbury, including Gordon Square, University College, Bedford Square, Doughty Street, and Tavistock Square.

Bloomsbury Group - web links Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain
News of events, regular bulletins, study materials, publications, and related links. Largely the work of Virginia Woolf specialist Stuart N. Clarke.

Bloomsbury Group - web links BBC Audio Essay – A Eulogy to Words
A charming sound recording of a BBC radio talk broadcast in 1937 – accompanied by a slideshow of photographs of Virginia Woolf.

Bloomsbury Group - web links A Family Photograph Albumn
Leslie Stephens’ collection of family photographs which became known as the Mausoleum Book, collected at Smith College – Massachusetts.

Bloomsbury Group - web links Bloomsbury at Duke University
A collection of book jacket covers, Fry’s Twelve Woodcuts, Strachey’s ‘Elizabeth and Essex’.

© Roy Johnson 2000-2014


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Woolf’s-head Publishing

August 9, 2009 by Roy Johnson

The Highlights and Newlights of the Hogarth Press

Woolf’s-head Publishing was produced to coincide with the exhibition of Hogarth Press publications which ran from February to April 2009 at the library of the University of Alberta, Canada. It’s not only a wonderful collection of cover designs, book jackets, and illustrations – but a beautiful example of book production in its own right. It’s typeset in Caslon Old Face, which Leonard Woolf and Virginia Woolf used when they first set up the Hogarth Press on a table in their dining room in 1917.

Hogarth Press The book’s dust jacket is printed on thick, richly textured paper with some of the exuberantly patterned papers originally used by the Press. It also features both of the woolf’s-head logos used by the Press, designed by Vanessa Bell and E. McKnight Kauffer. Even the interior pages of the book are coloured, using tints and washes which are a tonal echo of the original designs.

Many of the book jacket illustrations by Vanessa Bell are already quite well known. But there are others by John Banting, Kauffer, and Trekkie Parsons (Leonard Woolf’s ‘lover’ after Virginia’s death) which illustrate the wide and imaginative range of visual approaches the Woolfs took for the presentation of their publications.

However, it’s difficult for book jackets of this kind not to look rather dated today, almost a hundred years after their first appearance. But what definitely do not look dated are the richly patterned papers Leonard imported from Czechoslovakia and Japan for the volumes of poetry. These look as visually fresh today as they did at the time.

The authors represented stretch from the famous names who made the Press such a commercially successful venture – T.S.Eliot, Freud, Woolf, Vita Sackville-West – to people who have since disappeared into literary obscurity – Ena Limebeer, R.C.Trvelyan, and Virginia’s sixteen-year-old discovery Joan Adeney Easdale.

There are also what author and exhibition curator Elizabeth Gordon describes as ‘surprises’ – books ‘less commonly associated with the Hogarth Press’. These include a Canadian poet, a Bengali biography, translations of German poetry, (reflecting Leonard’s internationalism) and even a diet book.

Quack! Quack!The other Press publications upon which the collection focuses are those by Virginia Woolf herself – all illustrated by her sister Vanessa Bell. There are also examples of the polemical essays published in the 1930s, which included arguments against Imperialism and in favour of feminism (of which Leonard was a champion). A short series of public letters even included ‘A Letter to Adolf Hitler’ by Louis Golding.

Best-sellers include Vita Sackville-West’s The Edwardians (1930) and All Passion Spent (1931), William Plomer’s detective thriller The Case is Altered (1932) and Christopher Isherwood’s Goodbye to Berlin (1939).

This book is a genuine collector’s item, and only months after its first publication it has started to win awards for its design and production values. Anyone with the slightest interest in book production, graphic design, typography, or Bloomsbury will want to own a copy the minute they clap eyes on it.

Hogarth Press Buy the book at Amazon UK

Hogarth Press Buy the book at Amazon US

© Roy Johnson 2009


Elizabeth Willson Gordon, Woolf’s-head Publishing: The Highlights and Newlights of the Hogarth Press, Alberta (CA): University of Alberta, 2009, pp.144, ISBN: 9781551952406


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Filed Under: Bloomsbury Group, Hogarth Press Tagged With: Bibliography, Bloomsbury, Graphic design, Hogarth Press, Leonard Woolf, Publishing, Virginia Woolf, Woolf's Head Publishing

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