Bloomsbury Group

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

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

Sissinghurst

August 16, 2015 by Roy Johnson

estate, castle, house, gardens, and their history

Sissinghurst is the country estate with castle in Kent that was restored and developed by Vita Sackville West as a compensation for the disappointment at not inheriting her 365 room ancestral home at Knole. Together with her husband Harold Nicolson she created a particularly fine set of gardens which have become famous with horticulturalists throughout the world. On the death of their son Nigel Nicolson in 1967, ownership of the house and its grounds passed to the National Trust in lieu of inheritance taxes, and its current tenants are the grandson Adam Nicolson and his family. This is a beautifully written account of his attempts to restore traditional Kentish farming methods to make the estate ecologically sound and self-sustaining.

Sissinghurst

But more than that it is his celebration of the countryside, its vegetation, cultivation, rural industries, and its history. The story begins with his boyhood discovery of rural life, very lyrically evoked in a manner that echoes Georgian nostalgia, even though he is dealing with a period as recent as the 1960s. He was fascinated by woodcutters, hop-stringing, sheep dipping, and all the apparatus of farming methods, his account of which read like passages from a novel by Thomas Hardy.

Sissinghurst gardens have been open to the public since the late 1930s, but he describes the conversion of the estate from working farm to a National Trust ‘visitor attraction’ with great sadness. When the residency passed into his own hands he researched its history and discovered that it had always been a fertile, productive, and profitable farming enterprise, and felt an urge to restore its traditional character.

He moved in with his family and was immediately served with an imperious and autocratic ‘Occupancy Agreement’ by the National Trust. They specified which rooms he could occupy, which buildings he could enter, and which way round to park his Land Rover. They also ruled that he must ask permission to have visitors and any photographs he took were copyright to the Trust.

He goes into the paleontological roots of the area and its essential foundations in Kentish Weald clay. This is followed by its meteorological history and the development of its plant and animal life, up to the formation of its first roads. His plan was to introduce what is now called mixed farming. There was considerable resistance to the idea – some of it coming from the people at Sissinghurst itself. They thought the reintroduction of chickens and pigs might produce an unpleasant smell for visitors.

The National Trust emerges from all this as an organisation as hidebound, snobbish, and bureaucratic as the stratum of society that it is trying its best to preserve. This is the landed gentry, and the fallen aristocracy who can no longer afford to maintain their own homes.

Nicolson traces the political and economic history of the area, back to the early sixteenth century and the origins of the current estate, its castle, house, and gardens. The degree of detail is quite astonishing. There is even an account of individual trees which have survived for four hundred years. However, after its heyday in the Elizabethan period the house and estate went into decline. Nevertheless, from a study of their history Nicolson draws the lesson that the estate could survive if it were treated as an organic whole.

Woven into this account are passages concerning his family history and the history of Kent. He paints a very sad picture of his grandfather Harold Nicolson in his eighties, reduced by a series of strokes to a state of humiliated debility that left him wishing for death. His own father comes across as remote, cold, and unloving. And yet the house was stuffed with thousands of letters written by his grandparents, parents, and their lovers and friends from the Bloomsbury Group, professing their love for each other. On this topic he astutely observes:

How much of it was real? Was this world of written intimacy and posted emotion, of long distance paternal and filial love, in fact a simulacrum of the real thing? A substitute for it? Nicolson closeness has been a written performance for a hundred years. And that unbroken fluency in the written word made me think that it concealed some lack. If closeness were the reality, would it need to be so often declared?

He ends with a retelling of his grandparents’ famously bizarre marriage and Vita Sackville West’s scandalous elopement with Violet Trefusis which Nicolson’s own father revealed in Portrait of a Marriage. It was Vita’s money that bought Sissinghurst, and he makes a good case for her putting her own stamp on the restoration of its fortunes – though the famous gardens were also part-designed by her husband.

It was Vita who went on to write a long series of articles about gardens for the Observer between 1947 and 1961. These gave her an opportunity to write about Sissinghurst in a way that brought it to the attention of the world – even though she never named it in the articles. The income from this writing was invested straight back in the development of the estate.

The National Trust eventually ceased its hostilities towards Adam Nicolson’s plans, and he was given the financial support and the time to prove that they could work. So the story has a happy ending, but as he points out in his sub-title, the process of organic farming and estate management is one that does not have any neat closure. He sees it as part of the history of a place.

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Adam Nicolson, Sissinghurst: An Unfinished History, London: HarperCollins, 2008, pp.342, ISBN: 0007240554

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Snapshots of Bloomsbury

April 17, 2011 by Roy Johnson

The private lives of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell

Snapshots of Bloomsbury is more or less the photograph albumns of Virginia Woolf’s family. Virginia Woolf herself is rightly celebrated as a writer of ‘sensibility’ – of matters spiritual, cerebral, artistic, and philosophical. Yet she was also very conscious of modern technology. She wrote about motor cars, the cinema, the underground, the radio, and even flying (though he had never been in an aeroplane). And she was also an enthusiastic amateur photographer, as was her sister Vanessa Bell. They had inherited an interest in photography from their great aunt Julia Margaret Cameron, the famous Victorian photographer and the photo albumns of their father Leslie Stephen.

From 1890 onwards the Kodak portable camera was both heavily promoted and enthusiastically taken up by female amateurs. Virginia and Vanessa took the photographs, developed them, printed them, and mounted them in albumns. And the Stephen sisters were not alone in their activity. Many of the other Bloomsbury Group luminaries took portraits of each other.

In her scholarly introduction to this collection Maggie Humm does her best to interpret them as biographical records of Virginia Woolf’s psychologically traumatic life history – but what she says is not at all convincing. She fortunately redeems these theoretical self-indulgences with two excellent contextual essays outlining both Virginia Woolf’s and Vanessa Bell’s relationship to the modernist movement in the arts between 1905 and the 1930s.

The book includes (and catalogues) the Monks House family albumns – though there are more photographs in other collections. There’s a great deal of the theory of photography in the preamble, but what will interest most people is who appears in the pictures, and what they tell us about the Bloomsbury Group and their lives.

Strictly speaking, the answer is not much that we didn’t already know, but there are some interesting social revelations, especially when seeing so many everyday snaps gathered together in one place.

For instance, there is a strange tension between clothed and unclothed bodies. People cluster on summer beaches engaged in sun-bathing – but dressed in three piece tweed suits, hats, pullovers, and thick woollen socks. Yet at the same time there is a cult of nudity, with innumerable children and even the doomed Everest mountaineer George Mallory (Duncan Grant’s lover) photographed stark naked.

It’s also worth noting how non-snobbish the photos are in the sisters’ choice of subjects. The collection includes many pictures of household servants dressed in their everyday working clothes.

The best photographs are those which we already know quite well – Woolf’s portraits taken by Man Ray and G. Beresford – but there’s also an excellent double portrait of Duncan Grant and John Maynard Keynes taken by Vanessa Bell.

There’s a great deal of lounging around in deck chairs, smoking pipes, and occasional appearances by E.M. Forster, T.S. Eliot, Vita Sackville-West, and Ethel Smyth (the lesbian composer who fell in love with Virginia Woolf) It’s also interesting to see that as the years progressed Leonard and Virginia Woolf, like many other close couples, began to look like each other.

So, there are no surprises or dramatic revelations here, but this is an elegantly produced collection which makes a useful contribution to the peripheral cultural record of a rich period in Britain’s artistic history.

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Maggie Humm (ed), Snapshots of Bloomsbury, London: Tate Publishing, 2006, pp.228, ISBN: 1854376721

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Some People (Harold Nicolson)

July 11, 2009 by Roy Johnson

amusing character sketches, fictions, and memoirs

Harold Nicolson was a career diplomat, best known for the fact that he was married to Vita Sackville-West, who had a love affair with Virginia Woolf (and other women) and that despite his own homosexuality they kept going a marriage whose apparent success was recorded in their son’s account, Portrait of a Marriage. Nicolson blew this way and that in both literary and sexual terms, but in 1927 he produced a wonderful collection of portraits, Some People, which is part documentary and part fiction.

They are based on his experiences of public school and the diplomatic service. The idea he explained to a friend ‘was to put real people into imaginary situations, and imaginary people into real situations’. You can view this as a new literary form, alongside such works as Virginia Woolf’s Orlando or just a personal whim, but the result is surprisingly polished and amusing. The sketches are based upon just the sort of upper-class privileged life Nicolson had led – scenes of a childhood spent in foreign legations supervised by a governess; life as a boarder at Wellington College; and early postings amongst similar toffs at the Foreign Office.

In one story Nicolson accompanies Lord Curzon on a diplomatic peace mission to Lausanne where he is due to negotiate with Poincaré and Mussolini – but the whole of the tale is focused on the Dickensian figure of Lord Curzon’s valet who drinks too much and disgraces himself in comic fashion at a high-ranking gala.

The stories are written in the first person – and for someone who had the opinions for which Nicolson became infamous, they are refreshingly self-deprecating. The narrator is more often than not the character in the wrong, the person who has a lesson to learn from others or from life itself. Real people such as Nicolson himself, Marcel Proust, Princess Bibesco, and Winston Churchill flit amongst fictional constructions in a perfectly natural and convincing manner.

The world of public school and Oxbridge run straight through seamlessly into that of the diplomatic service, and even though Nicolson’s conclusions are that its stiff conventions should be challenged and even broken, his stories rest heavily on the shared values of the Old School Tie, letters of introduction, and the right accent.

They reminded me of no less than the early stories of Vladimir Nabokov (written around the same time) which similarly combine autobiographical memoirs with fictional inventions. And the style is similar – supple, fast-moving sentences, a fascination with foreign words and places, and the phenomena of everyday life pinned down with well-observed details.

There was a lake in front of the hotel, cupped among descending pines, and in the middle of the lake a little naked island, naked but for a tin pagoda, with two blue boats attached to a landing-stage of which the handrail was of brown wood and the supports of pink.

It was this that made me think again of Jeanne de Hénaut.

It is writing which is very sophisticated, and which ultimately flatters the reader – it draws you seductively into this world of privilege, clubishness, and money. And yet if he had written more, I should certainly want to read them.

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Harold Nicolson, Some People, London: Constable, 1996, pp.184, ISBN: 094765901

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South from Granada

May 26, 2009 by Roy Johnson

life, art, culture, and food of 1920s Spain

Gerald Brenan was a Bloomsbury Group fringe figure who spent much of his adult life living in and writing about Spain. This is his much-loved travel memoir which recounts setting up home in the Alpujarras in the 1920s – a beautiful but fairly remote area of the south between Granada and the coast. It’s a joy to read for all sorts of reasons – partly because of his amazing fortitude and resourcefulness, and partly because of the empathy he shows towards everything with which he comes into contact.

At first he lived on next to nothing, with no water, gas, or electricity, settling in a village miles from anywhere. His idea was to spend his time reading, catching up on an education which he had not received at public school. His food came virtually straight off the land – for this area is rich in fruit, vegetables, and the olive oil for which it is famous. He integrates completely with the locals, and gives wonderfully sympathetic accounts of their customs and behaviour. Anything he wants to buy is miles away in Almeria, Orgiva, or Malaga, and his account includes expeditions we would now consider positively heroic:

I set out therefore on foot by the still-unfinished coast road, buying as I went bread, cheese, and oranges, and sleeping on the beaches. Since I was in poor walking condition, I took five days to do the hundred a fifty miles.

He is amazingly at one with nature. I imagine a keen botanist would find double pleasure in his description of excursions into the Sierra Nevada. And literary fans will be amused at his accounts of visits from Lytton Strachey and Dora Carrington, then Leonard Woolf and Virginia Woolf. His portrait of Strachey’s calvary on the outing to Lanjaron, riding over mountains side-saddle on a mule, carrying a parasol, and complaining of piles – is pricelessly funny.

There are chapters on the calendar of village life, of festivals and religious beliefs, and in particular the powerful local superstitions; a whole section on local food – paella, bacalao, and gazpacho – all quite common now, but at the time, like food off another planet.

There’s a chapter which creates en passant a whole analysis of the Bloomsbury Group and most of its major figures, plus why he felt that by 1930 it had outlived itself as a cultural force. His description of the pleasures and riches of walking in the mountains would take you several holidays just to re-trace his steps.

He offers a history of the region which starts at the Mesolithic Age and traces its development in terms of agriculture, architecture, politics, and land cultivation. He even throws in a chapter describing a guided tour to the brothels of Almeria.

It’s no wonder why this book has remained a popular classic which never goes out of print. Read it if you are interested in Spain, Bloomsbury, or just an account of life, art, and culture from a sensitive and intelligent human being. He went on to write one of the definitive accounts of the Spanish Civil War – but it’s this book which you will want to keep on your shelf.

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Gerald Brenan, South from Granada, London: Penguin, 2008, pp.336, ISBN 0141189320

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T.S.Eliot biography

November 29, 2010 by Roy Johnson

education, poetry, marriages, Bloomsbury

T.S.Eliot (Thomas Stearns) was born in Saint Louis, Missouri in 1888. His father was a successful businessman, and his mother wrote poems. From 1898 to 1905 he attended Smith Academy where he studied French, German, Latin, and Ancient Greek. At the age of fourteen he began to write poetry, heavily under the influence of The Rubiyat of Omar Khayyam which enjoyed a vogue around that time. He published his first poem in the Smith Academy Record when he was fifteen.

From 1906 to 1909 he studied philosophy at Harvard University, where he also discovered the poetry of Jules LaForgue, Arthur Rimbaud, and Paul Verlaine. and the French symbolists. He wrote some of his early poems, including ‘Portrait of a Lady’ and the beginnings of ‘Prufrock’ and published in the Harvard Advocate.

He worked as a post-graduate teaching assistant in philosophy between 1909-1910 and then went to study philosophy at the Sorbonne in Paris. There he attended lectures by Henri Bergson and read poetry with Alain-Fournier.

He then returned to Harvard to study Indian philosophy and Sanskrit, and was awarded a scholarship to study at Oxford University. The outbreak of war in Europe in 1914 cut short a visit to Germany and his plans to study in Marburg. His short satiric poems. ‘The Love Song of J.Alfred Prufrock’ were published in Chicago, and in 1915 he married Vivienne Haigh-Wood, a Cambridge governess. By 1916 at Oxford he completed his PhD thesis on Knowledge and Experience in the Philosophy of F.H.Bradley, but he did not turn up for the viva voce examination.

He became resident in London, and took up a number of jobs, including being a teacher, a bank clerk and assistant editor of the literary magazine Egoist. He also lectured at Birkbeck College which specialised in the teaching of adult students at the University of London. Bertrand Russell took an interest in Eliot’s work, introduced him to the Bloomsbury Group, and allowed the young married couple to stay in his London flat. This also gave Russell the opportunity to have an affair with Eliot’s wife.

He also taught French and Latin at a private school in Highgate where one of his students was a young John Betjemann. In 1917 he took a job working in the foreign accounts department of Lloyds Bank. ‘Prufrock and Other Observations’ was published at this time. Then on a visit to Paris in 1920 he met both James Joyce and Wyndham Lewis, forming lasting friendships with both of them.

He became the London correspondent for the American literary magazine The Dial. and editor of The Criterion in 1922 when it was founded with the financial backing of Lady Rothmere, the wife of Lord Rothmere, owner of the Daily Mail. This was a highpoint year for Eliot, with the publication by the Hogarth Press of The Waste Land. In 1925 Eliot joined the publishing firm Faber and Gwyer, which later became Faber and Faber, where he remained as a director for the rest of his life.

Despite his literary success, Eliot’s private life was not happy, and he considered divorcing Vivienne, who was showing signs of mental instability. In 1927 he converted to a form of High Anglicanism and at the same time became a British citizen. Then when Harvard University offered him a visiting professorship for a year in 1932, he took the position, leaving Vivienne behind. On his return he arranged a legal separation from her and she was admitted to a mental hospital in Stoke Newington. He never visited her, and she died there in 1938.

In the 1930s T.S.Eliot turned his attention from lyric poetry to the production of verse dramas. Murder in the Cathedral and The Family Reunion are open apologies for Christian religious belief. These were followed by essays and criticism which reaffirmed his belief in conservative traditionalism, then later The Cocktail Party (1949) and The Elder Statesman (1958). He was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1948.

From 1946 Eliot shared a flat with his friend John Davy Hayward, who became his literary archivist, gathering many of the poems Eliot had written whilst a student at Harvard. These were not published until after Eliot’s death as Poems Written in Early Youth. In 1957 Eliot suddenly married his secretary at Faber – Esmé Valerie Fletcher, who was thirty-seven years younger than him. The marriage was held in secret at 6.15 in the morning. Hayward moved out, taking his Eliot papers with him. He dedicated them to King’s College Cambridge the following year.

Valerie took over the role of literary custodian, and has dedicated her life to preserving a very tight control over Eliot’s papers ever since. In his later years Eliot suffered from ill health – bronchitis, tachycardia, and emphysema – all made worse by his heavy smoking. He died in 1965, was cremated at Golder’s Green Cemetary and his ashes taken to St Michael’s church in East Coker, the village in Somerset from where his ancestors had emigrated to America.

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.

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.

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

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: 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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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The Bedside Companion to Virginia Woolf

June 26, 2009 by Roy Johnson

This is a really curious book, both in appearance and content. The text is presented in double columns like a Victorian newspaper, and its subject is just about everything you could think of regarding Virginia Woolf and Bloomsbury – but offered in quick snatches and potted summaries. It’s not a continuous narrative but a series of overlapping sketches and thematic surveys.

The chapters switch from biography to social history, then on to Woolf’s major fictional writing, and back again to the geography of Bloomsbury, the houses they all lived in, and their relationships with feminism, the two world wars, and even animals. This renders the treatment rather superficial, but I imagine it will make the book more interesting to the people it is aimed at – because new characters, incidents, and themes are coming up on almost every page.

Sandwiched amongst the main text there are panels featuring such topics as the other artistic movements of the period, the geography of Bloomsbury and Fitzrovia, synopses of Woolf’s major novels, and issues such as pacifism and even films based on Bloomsbury. There are biographical sketches of most of the principal characters, from Virginia Woolf’s family and outwards, covering minor figures such as Saxon Sydney-Turner and Dora Carrington. Each of these sections has suggestions for further reading which are commendably up to date.

It’s also worth saying that the book is generously illustrated with some refreshingly original photographs – but also with some amateurish sketches which would have been better left out.

Sarah Hall is very good at keeping track of the many complex relationships which were established in Bloomsbury and its outer reaches. Speaking of the artist Duncan Grant she notes:

Through a friendship with the art critic Bernard Berenson’s step-daughters, Ray and Karin Costelloe (Ray became Bunny Garnet’s first wife, Karin married Adrian Stephen), he stayed at the Berenson’s villa in Florence, I Tatti, and learned at first hand the politics of art dealing.

She takes a sympathetic view of Bloomsbury – sometimes to the point of almost naive enthusiasm. She thinks that Virginia and Leonard Woolf were ‘faithful’ to each other during their marriage, and that Bloomsbury’s homosexual men were ‘not promiscuous’ – which would have been news to most of them.

If a good test of critical writing is that it makes a reader wish to re-visit the work, then one of the most successful chapters is on Virginia Woolf’s short stories which offers a sympathetic and insightful account of those profoundly experimental studies. Other highlights include chapters on the Hogarth Press, Lytton Strachey, and the Memoir Club.

It would not matter which aspect of Virginia Woolf or Bloomsbury you wished to pursue – be it Woolf’s feminism or mental illness, the lives of her relatives, the writing and art works of her friends, or even the popular walking tours which retrace her steps through London and the Home Counties – this would be an excellent point of departure.

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Sarah M. Hall, The Beside, Bathroom, and Armchair Companion to Virginia Woolf and Bloomsbury, London: Continuum, 2007, pp.206, ISBN 0826486754

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The Bloomsbury Group – 1886-1919

August 6, 2009 by Roy Johnson

art, literature, philosophy, design, modernism

1832. Leslie Stephen born in Kensington Gore, London into a family of evangelical Christian reformers. Educated at Eton College.

1851. Enters Trinity Hall, Cambridge and is elected to the Apostles (a quasi-secret elite debating group). Graduates in 1854, and in 1857 becomes a fellow and tutor at Trinity.

1865. Renounces his religious beliefs, even though he was a clergyman.

1866. Roger Fry born in Highgate, London. George Eliot, Felix Holt the Radical. Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

1869. Leslie Stephen marries Harriet Thackeray, the daughter of William Makepeace Thackeray, who died in 1875. He subsequently married Julia Prinsep Jackson, the widow of the publisher Herbert Duckworth.

1872. Birth of Bertrand Russell.

1873. Birth of Ottoline Violet Anne Cavendish Bentinck (later Ottoline Morrell).

1875 Leslie Stephen marries Julia Prinsep Jackson and settles at Hyde Park Gate in Kensington, London.

1877. Desmond MacCarthy born. Victoria declared Empress of India. Henry James, The American;

1879. E.M. Forster born in London. Vanessa Stephen (later Vanessa Bell) born at Hyde Park Gate. George Meredith, The Egoist. Henry James, Daisy Miller

1880. Lytton Strachey born at Clapham Common and raised at Lancaster Gate. Thoby Stephen born. Saxon Sydney-Turner born. Leonard Woolf born. First Anglo-Boer war in South Africa.

1881. Clive Bell born. Henry James, Washington Square and The Portrait of a Lady.

1882. Virginia Stephen (later Virginia Woolf) born at Hyde Park Gate.

1883. John Maynard Keynes born in Cambridge. Adrian Stephen born.

Bloomsbury Recalled is written by Quentin Bell, one of the last surviving members of the Bloomsbury circle. He offers a disarmingly candid portraits of his father, Clive Bell, who married the author’s mother, Vanessa Stephen (Virginia Woolf’s sister). He pursued love affairs while Vanessa, after a clandestine affair with art critic Roger Fry, lived openly with bisexual painter Duncan Grant, with whom she had a daughter, Angelica. Clive, Duncan and Vanessa were reunited under one roof in 1939, and the author conveys a sense of the emotional strain of growing up in ‘a multi-parent family.’ Acclaimed biographer of his aunt, Virginia Woolf, Bell here defends her as a feminist and pacifist. Along with chapters on John Maynard Keynes, Ottoline Morrell and art historian-spy Anthony Blunt, there are glimpses of Lytton Strachey, novelist David Garnett (Angelica’s husband) and Dame Ethel Smyth, the pipe-smoking lesbian composer, who fell in love with Virginia Woolf.
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1885. Duncan Grant born in Inverness, Scotland. Roger Fry enters King’s College Cambridge. Death of General Gordon at Khartoum.

1888. Roger Fry obtains a first class honours in natural sciences, but decides to study painting. Rudyard Kipling, Plain Tales from the Hills. Henry James, The Aspern Papers.

1892. Birth of David Garnett (son of translators Edward and Constant Garnett). Roger Fry studies painting in Paris. First edition of Vogue appears in New York. Birth of Vita Sackville-West. Thomas Hardy, The Well Beloved.

1893. Roger Fry’s first writings on art. Independent Labour Party founded. Birth of Dora Carrington in Hereford.

1894. Roger Fry gives university extension lectures at Cambridge on Italian art. Desmond MacCarthy enters Trinity College Cambridge.

1895. Death of Mrs Leslie Stephen. Virginia Stephen’s first mental breakdown. Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest.

1896. Roger Fry marries Helen Coombe. Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure.

1897. E.M. Forster enters King’s College Cambridge. Desmond MacCarthy leaves Trinity College. Virginia Stephen attends Greek and history classes at King’s College London. Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee. Henry James, The Spoils of Poynton and What Masie Knew.

1899. Roger Fry Giovanni Bellini. Clive Bell, Thoby Stephen, Lytton Strachey, Saxon Sydney-Turner, and Leonard Woolf all enter Trinity College Cambridge, and establish The Midnight Society – a reading group. Henry James, The Awkward Age.

1900. Roger Fry gives university extension classes on art at Cambridge. Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams, Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity, Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim

1901. Vanessa Stephen enters the Royal Academy Schools. Roger Fry becomes art critic of The Atheneum. E.M. Forster leaves Cambridge, travels in Greece and Italy, and begins writing A Room with a View. Death of Queen Victoria. Edwardian period begins.

1902. Duncan Grant attends Westminster Art School. Leonard Woolf, Saxon Sydney-Turner, and Lytton Strachey elected to ‘The Apostles’ – a semi-secret discussion group. All come under the influence of philosopher G.E. Moore. Clive Bell does historical research in London. Adrian Stephen enters Trinity College, Cambridge. John Maynard Keynes enters King’s College, Cambridge. Virginia Stephen starts private Greek lessons. Marriage of Philip and Ottoline Morrell. Henry James, The Wings of the Dove. Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

1903. G.E. Moore, Principia Ethica. Roger Fry’s first exhibition of paintings and drawings. Desmond MacCarthy writes criticism for The Speaker. John Maynard Keynes elected to The Apostles. E.M. Forster’s first short stories published in the Independent Review. Henry James, The Ambassadors

The Bloomsbury Group is a short but charming book, published by the National Portrait Gallery. It explores the impact of Bloomsbury personalities on each other, plus how they shaped the development of British modernism. But most of all it’s a delightful collection of portrait paintings and photographs, with biographical notes. It has an introductory essay which outlines the development of Bloomsbury, followed by a series of portraits and the biographical sketches of the major figures.

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1904. Death of Sir Leslie Stephen. Virginia, Vanessa, and bothers move to Gordon Square, Bloomsbury. Clive Bell lives in Paris, doing more research. Lytton Strachey works on a fellowship dissertation on Warren Hastings (unsuccessful). Leonard Woolf leaves Cambridge and joins the civil service as an administrator in Ceylon. Saxon Sydney-Turner leaves Cambridge and becomes a clerk in the Estate Duty Office. Virginia Stephen’s first review published in The Guardian and she has her second mental breakdown. Bertrand Russell goes to teach at Harvard, where T.S. Eliot is one of his students. Henry James, The Golden Bowl.

1905. Publication of Euphrosyne: A Collection of Verse with anonymous contributions by Clive Bell, Saxon Sydney-Turner, Leonard Woolf, and Lytton Strachey. E.M. Forster, Where Angels Fear to Tread. Virginia Stephen teaching at Morley College London, an evening institute for working men and women. Thoby Stephens begins the Thursday evenings at Gordon Square for his friends. Vanessa organises The Friday Club, a discussion group for the arts. Oscar Wilde has theatrical success, but is put on trial and imprisoned.

1906. Roger Fry accepts curatorship of the Department of Painting, Metropolitan Museum of New York. Duncan Grant studies art in Paris. John Maynard Keynes joins the India Office. Thoby Stephen contracts typhoid fever whilst on holiday in Turkey and dies on return to England. Election of Philip Morrell as Liberal MP for Burnley, Lancashire. Labour Party formed.

1907. E.M.Forster, The Longest Journey. Vanessa Stephen marries Clive Bell. Virginia and Adrian Stephen move to 29 Fitzroy Square, where Thursday evenings begin again. Virginia working on her first novel. Desmond MacCarthy edits The New Quarterly. Lytton Strachey begins writing reviews for The Spectator. Play-reading Society started at 46 Gordon Square with the Bells, Adrian and Virginia Stephen, Lytton Strachey, and Saxon Sydney-Turner. Meets intermittently until 1914.

1908. E.M.Forster, A Room with a View. Julian Bell born. John Maynard Keynes leaves the civil service and becomes the lover of Duncan Grant.

1909. Roger Fry, ‘An Essay on Aesthetics’. He becomes editor of The Burlington Magazine. Lytton Strachey proposes to Virginia Stephen. Duncan Grant moves in to 21 Fitzroy Square. John Maynard Keynes elected to a fellowship at King’s College, Cambridge. Saxon Sydney-Turner and Virginia and Adrian Stephen go to the Wagner Festival in Bayreuth. Lady Ottoline Morrell visits the Thursday evening group at Fitzroy Square.

Among the Bohemians: Experiments in Living 1900—1930 was written by Virginia Nicholson, Quentin Bell’s daughter and grand-daughter of Vanessa Bell, who was Virginia Woolf’s sister. Bloomsbury lies at the heart of the book in its portraits of Ralph Partridge, Virginia Woolf, Duncan Grant, Lytton Strachey, Dora Carrington, and Katherine Mansfield, plus peripheral figures such as Arthur Ransome, Rupert Brooke, Augustus John, Nina Hamnett, and Dylan and Caitlin Thomas. Very amusing, well written, and every page dense with top class gossip and anecdotes. She looks at their tangled love lives naturally, but also their radical ideas on money (and poverty) food, dress, and even child-raising. Highly recommended.
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1910. E.M.Forster’s Howards End is his first major success. The Dreadnought hoax takes place. Roger Fry meets Duncan Grant and the Bells, talks to the Friday Club, and is dismissed from the Metropolitan Museum by J.P. Morgan. Fry’s wife Helen confined to mental institution as incurably insane (where she dies in 1937). Virginia Stephen does voluntary work for women’s suffrage and spends time in a nursing home in Twickenham. Lytton Strachey meets Ottoline Morrell. First Post-Impressionist Exhibition at the Grafton Galleries organised by Roger Fry. Carrington wins scholarship to study at the Slade.

1911. E.M. Forster, The Celestial Omnibus and Other Stories. Virginia Stephen leases a house at Firle, Sussex. Roger Fry starts lecturing at the Slade School. The Bells and the Frys travel together in Turkey. Vanessa Bell starts an affair with Roger Fry. Leonard Woolf returns from Ceylon. John Maynard Keynes becomes a lecturer in economics at Cambridge. Virginia and Adrian Stephen move to Brunswick Square, where they share their house with Leonard Woolf, John Maynard Keynes, and Duncan Grant.

1912. Lytton Strachey, Landmarks in French Literature. E.M. Forster travels in India. John Maynard Keynes becomes editor of The Economic Journal. Leonard Woolf resigns from the colonial service and marries Virginia Woolf: they live in Clifford’s Inn, London and Asham House, Sussex. Second Post-Impressionist exhibition organised by Roger Fry. Sinking of the Titanic.

1913. Leonard Woolf, The Village and the Jungle (novel). Saxon Sydney-Turner joins the Treasury. John Maynard Keynes, Indian Currency and Finance. E.M. Forster returns from India and starts writing A Passage to India and Maurice. Leonard Woolf begins reviewing for the newly established The New Statesman and studies the Co-Operative movement. Omega Workshop founded by Roger Fry and Duncan Grant. Virginia Woolf has another nervous breakdown and attempts suicide. Vanessa Bell starts an affair with Duncan Grant. Vita Sackville-West marries Harold Nicolson. First crossword puzzle published. D.H. Lawrence, Sons and Lovers.

1914. Clive Bell, Art. Leonard Woolf, The Wise Virgins (novel). John Maynard Keynes joins the Treasury. Virginia and Leonard Woolf move to Richmond from Clifford’s Inn. Outbreak of first world war. James Joyce, Dubliners; Marcel Proust begins to publish Remembrance of Things Past.

1915. Clive Bell’s Peace at Once manifesto is ordered to be destroyed by Lord Mayor of London. E.M. Forster working in Alexandria with the Red Cross. Leonard and Virginia Woolf move into Hogarth House, Richmond. Virginia Woolf publishes her first novel, The Voyage Out. T.S. Eliot, ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’. Carrington meets Lytton Strachey at Ottoline Morrell’s estate at Garsington Manor, Oxford.

Portrait of a Marriage is a double biography of novelist Vita Sackville-West and her diplomat husband Harold Nicolson, written by their son Nigel. It is based on an autobiographical manuscript found after Vita’s death and describes the apparent success of the marriage, despite the fact that they both had homosexual relationships with other people. It also captures some of the flavour of these complex personal relationships within the Bloomsbury Group which made it famous – and notorious.
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1916. Lytton Strachey’s application for conscientious objection to serving in the war is denied, but he is granted exemption for medical reasons. Leonard Woolf, International Government: Two Reports: he is exempted from conscription for medical reasons. Clive Bell does ‘alternative labour’ working on Morrell’s farm at Garsington. John Maynard Keynes and friends takes over 46 Gordon Square, which then remains Keynes’ London Home. Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant, and David Garnett (Duncan Grant’s lover) move to Charleston in Sussex so that Grant and Garnett can do alternative service on a farm. Bell and Grant then live there permanently. Virginia Woolf lectures to Richmond branch of the Women’s Co-Operative Guild, and does reviews for the Times Literary Supplement (which at that time were anonymous). Bertrand Russell dismissed from Trinity College Cambridge for anti-war activities. James Joyce, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

1917. Leonard and Virginia Woolf buy a printing press as a therapeutic hobby for Virginia, and print Two Stories as the first publication of the Hogarth Press. Leonard edits The Framework for a Lasting Peace and becomes secretary to the Labour Party advisory committee on imperial and international questions. Virginia begins keeping a regular diary. Lytton Strachey and Carrington set up home together at Mill House, Tidmarsh, Berkshire. T.S. Eliot, Prufrock and Other Observations.

1918. Lytton Strachey, Eminent Victorians. Leonard Woolf becomes editor of The International Review and, Co-operation and the Future of Industry. Katherine Mansfield’s The Prelude published by the Hogarth Press. At the suggestion of Roger Fry and Duncan Grant, John Maynard Keynes persuades the Treasury to purchase works of art from the Degas sale in Paris. Angelica Bell born: (her father is actually Duncan Grant).

1919. The Hogarth Press publishes Virginia Woolf’s Kew Gardens and T.S. Eliot’s Poems, but do not publish James Joyce’s Ulysses, which had been offered to them. Virginia Woolf’s second novel Night and Day appears, and she starts brief friendship with Katherine Mansfield. John Maynard Keynes is the principal representative of the Treasury at the Versailles Peace Treaty, from which he resigns in protest at the war reparations imposed on Germany. He writes The Economic Consequences of the Peace. The Bells, the Woolfs, Keynes, Fry, and Grant meet Diaghilev’s Ballet Russes troupe in London, including Picasso, Derain, Stravinsky, Massine, Nijinski, and Lydia Lopokova. Woolfs move to Monk’s House, Rodmell, Sussex. Carrington marries Ralph Partridge (Lytton Strachey’s lover). Vita Sackville-West ‘elopes’ to Paris with Violet Trefusis.

The Bloomsbury Group 1920-1987 – Part Two of this timeline

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The Bloomsbury Group – 1920-1987

August 9, 2009 by Roy Johnson

1920. Roger Fry, Vision and Design (a series of essays). Leonard Woolf writes leaders for The Nation. Omega workshop closes. First meeting of the Bloomsbury group Memoir Club. Desmond MacCarthy becomes literary editor of The New Statesman. E.M. Forster becomes literary editor of the London Daily Herald. Duncan Grant has his first one-man show in London. Carrington, Partridge, and Strachey visit Gerald Brenan in Spain.

1921. Virginia Woolf publishes her collection of experimental short stories, Monday or Tuesday, then falls ill and inactive for four months. Lytton Strachey, Queen Victoria. Dora Carrington marries Ralph Partridge, but continues to live with Lytton Strachey (who is in love with Ralph Partridge). E.M. Forster works in India as temporary secretary to Maharajah of Dewas. Leonard Woolf, Stories from the East and Socialism and Co-operation. John Maynard Keynes, A Treatise on Probability.

1922. Virginia Woolf publishes her first modernist novel, Jacob’s Room and starts her love affair with Vita Sackville West. Leonard Woolf is defeated as Labour candidate for the Combined University constituency. John Maynard Keynes, A Revision of the Treaty. Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant decorate Keynes’s rooms at King’s College, Cambridge. Lytton Strachey, Books and Characters: French and English. E.M. Forster, Alexandria: A History and a Guide. T.S. Eliot founder and editor of The Criterion. David Garnett, Lady into Fox. James Joyce’s, Ulysses published in Paris. Katherine Mansfield, The Garden Party.

1923. The Hogarth Press publishes T.S. Eliot’s, The Waste Land. John Maynard Keynes, A Tract on Monetary Reform: he becomes chairman of the board of The Nation and Atheneum, whilst Leonard Woolf becomes its literary editor. E.M. Forster, Pharos and Pharillon. Leonard and Virginia Woolf visit Gerald Brenan in Spain. Carrington begins an affair with Henrietta Bingham (one of Strachey’s former lovers).

1924. E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India widely acclaimed: (the composition of the novel was interrupted by the first world war – as was Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain). Virginia Woolf’s manifesto on modern literature, ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’. The Hogarth Press publishes Freud’s Collected Papers and begins the Psycho-Analytic Library. Lytton Strachey, Carrington, and Ralph Partridge move to Ham Spray House, Berkshire. The Woolfs (and the Hogarth Press) move to 52 Tavistock Square in Bloomsbury. First UK Labour government formed under Ramsey MacDonald (lasts nine months).

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1925. Virginia Woolf publishes both The Common Reader and Mrs Dalloway, then is ill for three months. Leonard Woolf, Fear and Politics: A Debate at the Zoo. Lytton Strachey’s play The Son of Heaven is performed, and he lectures on Pope at Cambridge. John Maynard Keynes marries Lydia Lopokova, and takes a lease on a house at Tilton, near Charleston, which remains his country home.

1926. UK General Strike. Adrian Stephen and his wife Karin obtain bachelor of medicine degrees to become psycho-analysts. Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant decorate the house of Mr and Mrs St John Hutchinson. Roger Fry, Transformations. Ralph Partridge leaves Dora Carrington for Frances Marshall. Carrington begins an affair with Julia Strachey (Lytton Strachey’s sister). Vita Sackville-West wins Hawthornden Prize for her poem The Land.

1927. Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse. Clive Bell, Landmarks in Nineteenth Century Painting. Leonard Woolf, Essays on Literature, History, and Politics. E.M. Forster gives the Clark lectures at Cambridge, which are published as Aspect of the Novel. He also becomes a fellow of King’s College. Julian Bell enters King’s College as an undergraduate. Roger Fry becomes an honorary fellow of King’s College. His study Cezanne is published.

1928. Virginia Woolf, Orlando, a biographical ‘love note’ to Vita Sackville-West. Lytton Strachey, Elizabeth and Essex: A Tragic History. Desmond MacCarthy succeeds Edmund Gosse as senior literary critic of the Sunday Times. E.M. Forster, The Eternal Moment and Other Stories. Clive Bell, Civilization. Leonard Woolf, Imperialism and Civilization. Death of Thomas Hardy. First Oxford English Dictionary published. Carrington starts an affair with Bernard Penrose.

1929. Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, which was first delivered as a series of lectures at Cambridge. Roger Fry lectures at the Royal Academy. Collapse of New York Stock Exchange. Start of world economic depression. Second UK Labour government under Ramsay MacDonald.

1930. Leonard Woolf helps to found The Political Quarterly and becomes its first editor. Roger Fry, Henri Matisse. John Maynard Keynes, A Treatise on Money. Vanessa Bell has an exhibition of her paintings in London. Pipe-smoking lesbian feminist composer Ethyl Smyth falls in love with Virginia Woolf. Mass unemployment in UK. Death of D.H. Lawrence.

Virginia 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 writer and her intellectual milieu.

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1931. Virginia Woolf, The Waves. Leonard Woolf, After the Deluge. Lytton Strachey, Portraits in Miniature. John Maynard Keynes, Essays in Persuasion. John Lehmann joins the Hogarth Press for the first time. Resignation of UK Labour government, followed by formation of national coalition government.

1932. Virginia Woolf, The Common Reader. Death of Lytton Strachey from stomach cancer, followed by suicide of Dora Carrington. Exhibition of paintings by Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant in London. New Signatures published by the Hogarth Press. Roger Fry, Characteristics of French Art and The Arts of Painting and Sculpture. Hunger marches start in UK.

1933. Virginia Woolf, Flush, a biography of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s pet dog. Roger Fry appointed Slade professor of art at Cambridge and, Art History as an Academic Study. Clive Bell becomes art critic of The New Statesman and Nation. John Maynard Keynes, Essays in Biography.

1934. Clive Bell, Enjoying Pictures. E.M. Forster, Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson. Death of Roger Fry, and publication of his Reflections on British Painting. Exhibition of Vanessa Bell’s paintings. Virginia Woolf publishes Walter Sickert: A Conversation.

1935. Private performance of Virginia Woolf’s unpublished play, ‘Freshwater: A Comedy in Three Acts’. John Maynard Keynes helps to establish the Arts Theatre in Cambridge. Leonard Woolf, Quack, Quack!.

1936. John Maynard Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money. E.M.Forster, Abinger Harvest, a collection of essays on literature and society. Virginia Woolf ill for two months. Death of George V in UK, followed by Edward VIII, who is forced to abdicate. Stalinist show trials in USSR. Julian Bell goes to participate in Spanish Civil War.

1937. Virginia Woolf, The Years. Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant both have exhibitions of their paintings. John Maynard Keynes seriously ill. Julian Bell killed in Spain.

The Art of Dora Carrington At the age of 38, Dora Carrington (1893-1932) committed suicide, unable to contemplate living without her companion, Lytton Strachey, who had died a few weeks before. The association with Lytton and his Bloomsbury friends, combined with her own modesty have tended to overshadow Carrington’s contribution to modern British painting. She hardly exhibited at all during her own lifetime. This book aims to redress the balance by looking at the immense range of her work: portraits, landscapes, glass paintings, letter illustrations and decorative work.

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1938. Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas, her ‘sequel’ to A Room of One’s Own. John Lehmann joins the Hogarth Press for the second time as its general manager, buying out Virginia Woolf’s financial interest. Leonard Woolf appointed as member of the Civil Service Arbitration Tribunal, on which he sits for seventeen years. Germans occupy Austria. Chamberlain meets Hitler to make infamous Munich ‘agreement’ to prevent war.

1939. Leonard Woolf, After the Deluge, vol.II, The Barbarians at the Gate, and a play, The Hotel. The Woolfs and the Hogarth Press move to 37 Mecklenburgh Square. Fascists win Civil War in Spain. Stalin makes pact with Hitler. Germany invades Poland. Britain and France declare war on Germany. James Joyce, Finnegans Wake.

1940. Virginia Woolf, Roger Fry: A Biography. Hogarth Press bombed in Mecklenburgh Square, moved to Herfordshire. Angelica Bell’s 21st birthday: ‘the last Bloomsbury party’.

1941. Virginia Woolf, Between the Acts, then commits suicide by drowning herself in the River Ouse. Death of James Joyce.

1942. Virginia Woolf’s essays The Death of the Moth and Other Essays published posthumously. Angelica Bell, Duncan Grant’s daughter, marries David Garnett, her father’s former lover. John Maynard Keynes elevated to the peerage and takes seat as Liberal in the House of Lords. He was also the chairman of the Committee for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts (which becomes the Arts Council in 1945).

1943. Virginia Woolf’s A Haunted House and Other Short Stories published posthumously. Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant, and Quentin Bell complete paintings for the parish church at Berwick, near Firle, Sussex.

1944. John Maynard Keynes is senior British representative at the Bretton Woods International Conference to plan for the aftermath of war.

1945. E.M. Forster elected honorary fellow at King’s College Cambridge, and takes up permanent residence there after his mother’s death. John Maynard Keynes goes to America to negotiate a loan for Britain. United Nations founded. Huge Labour victory in UK general election. Clement Atlee becomes prime minister.

1946. Death of John Maynard Keynes. Leonard Woolf sells John Lehmann’s interest in the Hogarth Press to Chatto and Windus. Vita Sackville-West made Companion of Honour for her services to literature.

1947. E.M. Forster, Collected Tales. Posthumous publication of Virginia Woolf’s The Moment and Other Essays.

1948. Death of Adrian Stephen. T.S. Eliot awarded Nobel prize for literature (for the UK).

1949. Posthumous publication of John Maynard Keynes’s Two Memoirs.

1950. Bertrand Russell awarded the Nobel prize for literature. Posthumous publication of Virginia Woolf’s The Captain’s DeathBed and Other Essays.

1951. E.M.Forster, Two Cheers for Democracy (essays) and writes the libretto for Benjamin Britten’s opera Billy Budd. Desmond MacCarthy knighted.

1952. Death of Desmond MacCarthy. Death of George V. Accession of Queen Elizabeth II at 25.

1953. Leonard Woolf, Principia Politica (vol.III of After the Deluge and also publishes extracts from Virginia Woolf’s diaries as A Writer’s Diary. E.M. Forster, The Hill of Devi. Death of Stalin – and Prokofiev on same day. Nobel prize for literature – Winston Churchill (UK).

1956. Leonard Woolf publishes his correspondence with Lytton Strachey. Last meeting of the Memoir Club. Exhibition of paintings by Vanessa Bell.

The Bloomsbury Artists: Prints and Book DesignsThis volume catalogues the woodcuts, lithographs, etchings and other prints created by Vanessa Bell, Dora Carrington, Roger Fry and Duncan Grant – with various colour and black and white reproductions. Of particular interest are the many book jackets designed for the Hogarth Press, the publishing company established by Leonard Woolf and Virginia Woolf. Also included are ephemera such as social invitations, trade cards, catalogue covers, and bookplates.

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1957. Exhibition of paintings by Duncan Grant. Homosexuality decriminalised in UK.

1958. Posthumous publication of Virginia Woolf’s Granite and Rainbow: Essays. Duncan Grant decorates Russell Chantry, Lincoln Cathedral.

1959. Duncan Grant has retrospective exhibition of his paintings at the Tate Gallery.

1960. Leonard Woolf, Sowing: An Autobiography of the Years 1880-1904 and revisits Ceylon.

1961. Leonard Woolf, Growing: An Autobiography of the Years 1904-1911. Death of Vanessa Bell: memorial exhibition of her paintings.

1962. Leonard Woolf, Diaries in Ceylon 1904-1911. Death of Saxon Sydney-Turner. Death of Vita Sackville-West.

1964. Leonard Woolf, Beginning Again: An Autobiography of the Years 1911-1918. Death of Clive Bell. Vanessa Bell: A Memorial Exhibition of her Paintings by the Arts Council.

1965. Posthumous publication of Virginia Woolf’s Contemporary Writers. Death of T.S. Eliot.

1967. Leonard Woolf, Downhill All the Way: An Autobiography of the Years 1919-1939.

1969. Leonard Woolf, The Journey Not the Arrival Matters: An Autobiography of the Years 1939-1969. Portraits by Duncan Grant: An Arts Council exhibition. E.M. Forster awarded the Order of Merit. Death of Leonard Woolf.

1970. Death of E.M. Forster at the home of friends. Death of Bertrand Russell.

1971. Posthumous publication of E.M. Forster’s overtly homosexual novel, Maurice (written in 1913). Posthumous publication of Lytton Strachey by Himself: A Self Portrait.

1972. Publication of Roger Fry’s Letters 2 vols. Duncan Grant: exhibition of water colours and drawings. Posthumous publication of Lytton Strachey’s The Really Interesting Question and Other Papers. Posthumous publication of E.M. Forster’s The Life to Come and Other Stories.

1973. Posthumous publication of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway’s Party: A Short Story Sequence. Vanessa Bell: Paintings and Drawings, An Exhibition.

1987. Death and burial of Gerald Brenan in Malaga, Spain.

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The Bloomsbury Group and War – 1/2

September 17, 2009 by Roy Johnson

internationalism, pacifism, and social resistance

Almost without exception, the members of the Bloomsbury Group were opposed to the first world war. Their attitudes varied from outright pacifism through conscientious objection to quietism and a form of radical internationalism normally only found in figures such as Trotsky and Lenin. The origins of these attitudes – which were extremely unusual at the time – lay in the liberal, laissez-faire, free-thinking and non-religious beliefs which seemed to have spread from late nineteenth-century intellectuals such as Sir Leslie Stephen (father of the Bloomsbury Group) and the next generation of Cambridge undergraduates of the period 1895-1905 who were heavily influenced by the philosophy of G.E.Moore, whose Principia Ethica promoted ideals of friendship and love towards others.

Conscription began in 1915, and whilst the government lied to the country about conditions at the front for propaganda purposes, the Bloomsbury Group were tipped off about the horrors of the trenches by Maynard Keynes, who as a member of the Treasury, and had insider information on government matters. He had also visited soldiers convalescing at Cambridge. They were recovering from shell shock and the grim truths of bayonet charges and ‘going over the top’. None of them wanted to go back.

Art critic Clive Bell was the son of a nouveau-riche family who had made their money in coal-mining in southern Wales, but established a fake-Tudor manor in Wiltshire, invented a family crest, and sent him to Marlborough College. Despite this very conservative background, in 1915 Bell published a controversial pamphlet, Peace at Once, calling for a negotiated settlement to the conflict. This was considered an outrageous suggestion by the establishment of the time, and copies of his essay were burned by the Public Hangman. Bell resisted conscription on the grounds of being a conscientious objector, and he spent some of the war years doing what was called ‘alternative service’ on a farm owned by the politician Philip Morrell and his wife Ottoline.

Leonard Woolf came from a background quite unlike other members of the Bloomsbury Group. He was the son of a Jewish barrister. Nevertheless, he met his fellow Bloomsberries at Cambridge and like them was influenced by the ethical theories of G.E.Moore. He served in the colonial service between 1905 and 1911 and developed first hand a healthy distaste for imperialism.

With the outbreak of the war, he was rejected as unfit for military service, and campaigned actively for peace. He joined the Labour Party and the Fabian Society and became a regular contributor to the New Statesman. In 1916 he wrote International Government which outlined future possibilities for a international agency to enforce peace in the world. The book was incorporated by the British government in its proposals for a League of Nations at Geneva.

Woolf maintained his anti-war and internationalist stance throughout his life, except for the period of the 1930s and the Second World War, when he somewhat reluctantly accepted that the threat of fascism was worth fighting against. He was also, like George Orwell (who had also served in and quit the colonial service) one of the few British intellectuals who saw through to the totalitarian tyranny underpinning Stalin’s sham democracy.

Bertrand Russell was a contemporary of the other Bloomsberries at Cambridge, but unlike them he took up an academic career, teaching philosophy. Although he was elected to the Royal Society in 1908, Russell’s teaching career at Cambridge appeared to come to an end in 1916 when he was dismissed from Trinity College because of a conviction for anti-war activities. Two years later he was convicted again. This time he spent six months in prison. It was while in prison that he wrote his well-received Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy (1919).

He continued to hold radical and anti-war views throughout the rest of his (long) life. In the 1950s and 1960s he was politically active in the campaign for nuclear disarmament (CND) and he opposed the American war in Vietnam. He established the International War Crimes Tribunal in 1966 with Jean-Paul Sartre and other Nobel prize winners.

The Bloomsbury Group and War — Part 2

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The Bloomsbury Group and War – 2/2

September 17, 2009 by Roy Johnson

internationalism, pacifism, and social resistance

The painter Mark Gertler was a pacifist who refused to support Britain’s involvement in the First World War. After the Battle of the Somme he painted Merry-go-Round (1916). Considered by many art critics as the most important British painting of the First World War, Merry-go-Round, shows a group of military and civilian figures caught on the vicious circle of the roundabout. One gallery refused to show the painting because Gertler was a conscientious objector. Eventually it appeared in the Mansard Gallery in May, 1917.

Society hostess Ottoline Morrell was educated at home and at Somerville College, Oxford, where she studied politics and history. Her husband Philip Morrell became a Liberal MP (for Blackburn) following the general election in 1906. He was critical of the government’s position on the First World War. They sheltered a number of conscientious objectors on their farm estate at Garsington near Oxford, including Duncan Grant, Clive Bell, and Mark Gertler. It was there that Siegfried Sassoon, recuperating after a period of sick leave, was encouraged to go absent without leave in a protest against the war.

Much scoffing has been expressed by their guests in thinly-veiled depictions in their novels about the luxury and extravagance of Garsington – but the truth is that the Morrells were sailing financially close to the edge, and eventually they had to sell the entire estate. Because Ottoline Morrell had a brief relationship with one of her members of staff, it’s assumed that this provided the creative spark for D.H.Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover.

The writer Gerald Brenan was unusual as a member of the Bloomsbury set, because he did serve in the war. He was the son of an army officer, and was partly educated at the military academy at Sandhurst. He served from 1914 to 1919 and was, as his biographer Jonathan Gaythorne-Hardy points out, a ‘brave, successful, conscientious and enthusiastic officer’. He spent over two years on the Western Front, reaching the rank of captain and winning a Military Cross and a Croix de Guerre.

David Bomberg – The Mudbath 1914

Biographer Lytton Strachey was a conscientious objector during the war. He is famous for his confrontation with the board which interrogated objectors. His claims of pacifism were challenged by a board member asking him what he would do if he found a German soldier raping his sister. His witty riposte was ‘I should try and come between them’. What is less well known is that Strachey could easily have evaded the inquisition on medical grounds, but didn’t. Even less well known than that is the fact that he wrote a polemical essay against the war.

The painter Duncan Grant was a pacifist, like most of the members of the Bloomsbury group, In order to be exempted from military service during World War I, he and David Garnett (his lover at the time) moved to Wissett in the Suffolk countryside to become farm labourers. Although they were at first refused exemption by a tribunal, they appealed and were eventually recognised as conscientious objectors.

Harold Nicolson worked as a diplomat in the Foreign Office. Because of this, he was exempt military service during the first world war. After the end of the first world war he took part in the Paris Peace Conference, and he was very critical of the punitive reparations extracted by the allies (which also caused his fellow Bloomsburyite John Maynard Keynes to resign from the commission).

Between the wars he flirted briefly with Sir Oswald Mosley’s fascists, but then entered the House of Commons as National Labour Party member for Leicester West in 1935. (His wife refused to visit the constituency, regarding it as ‘bedint’ – a family slang term for ‘unacceptably low class’.)

He was very active as a parliamentarian, and became a keen supporter of Winston Churchill, especially during the second world war, when he was appointed private secretary to the Minister of Information in the government of national unity. He lost his seat in the 1945 election, and then despite joining the Labour Party, he failed to get back into parliament. He is a fairly rare example of someone from the upper class whose political allegiances moved leftwards as he got older.

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John Maynard Keynes lectured in economics at Cambridge on and off from 1908. He also worked at the India Office and in 1913 as a member of the Royal Commission on Indian finance and currency, published his first book on the subject. His expertise was in demand during the First World War. He worked for the Adviser to the Chancellor of the Exchequer and to the Treasury on Financial and Economic Questions. Among his responsibilities were the design of terms of credit between Britain and its continental allies during the war, and the acquisition of scarce currencies.

He represented the Treasury at the Versailles Peace Conference, but resigned in strong opposition to the terms of the draft treaty which he set out in his next book Economic Consequences of the Peace, (1919). Keynes argued that the war reparations imposed on Germany could not be paid by a country which had been devastated by war. He warned that this would lead to further conflict in Europe – which of course turned out to be true.

The poet Rupert Brooke is often (quite erroneously) classed as a ‘war poet’ because some of his early works glamourised the idea of war – and he was in fact a fervent supporter of it. But he never saw active service. His poetry gained many enthusiasts and he was taken up by Edward Marsh, who brought him to the attention of Winston Churchill, who was at that time First Lord of the Admiralty. Through these connections he was commissioned into the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve as a temporary Sub-Lieutenant shortly after his 27th birthday and took part in the Royal Naval Division’s Antwerp expedition in October 1914.

He sailed with the British Mediterranean Expeditionary Force on 28 February 1915 but developed sepsis from an infected mosquito bite. He died on 23 April 1915 off the island of Lemnos in the Aegean on his way to a battle at Gallipoli. As the expeditionary force had orders to depart immediately, he was buried in an olive grove on the island of Skyros, Greece.

The Bloomsbury Group and War — Part I

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