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A Boy at the Hogarth Press

July 1, 2009 by Roy Johnson

Adrian Mole meets Bloomsbury

Richard Kennedy started work at the Hogarth Press when he was sixteen. He had been a complete failure at Marlborough School, and was fixed up with the job through a family connection as a special favour, starting work at one pound a week. His memoirs (and atmospheric line illustrations) were produced many years later, and they take great delight in contrasting the youth’s naive enthusiasm and his bewilderment with the sophisticated milieu into which he had been transported.

A Boy at the Hogarth Press Leonard Woolf ran an enterprise in the Hogarth Press which was commercially very successful, and Kennedy joined it at a time in the 1920s when the work of Virginia Woolf (particularly Orlando) and Vita Sackville-West (All Passion Spent) were virtually best-sellers. But his approach is to depict these intellectual giants as they were seen by a sixteen year old boy. He was far more interested in learning how to chat up girls than the lofty aspirations of his employers. He contrives to present an ‘Emperor’s New Clothes’ approach to all things Bloomsbury, and the result is a sort of Adrian Mole version of events.

The saintly Virginia Woolf, who at that time was producing some of the most advanced texts of literary modernism, is pictured as she would appear to a young teenager:

She looks at us over the top of her steel-rimmed spectacles, her grey hair hanging over her forehead and a shag cigarette (which she rolls herself) hanging from her lips. She wears a hatchet-blue overall and sits hunched in a wicker armchair with her pad on her knees and a small typewriter beside her.

His employer, the indefatigable Leonard Woolf, who ran the whole enterprise with rigorous efficiency, is cut down to size in a similar fashion:

After lunch we all straggled home over the Downs. LW stopped to have a pee in a very casual way without attempting any sort of cover. I could see that this was a part of his super-rational way of living.

But for all the naive self deprecation, you know that Kennedy is well connected. He is in fact from the same social milieu as the people he describes, as he reveals in a throwaway remark on a visit to St Ives::

The picnic over, we returned to Talland House – curiously enough, the scene of Virginia Woolf’s first successful novel, To the Lighthouse. Her parents had rented the house from my aunt’s parents .

The book is decorated by spidery but very evocative drawings which capture the mood of the era and the spirit of the text. Amazingly, they were drawn from memory in the 1970s, yet capture both the period and the principal characters very well.

It’s a slight book to say the least, but it’s very amusing and it throws light onto the workings of what was a very successful publishing business – and for Bloomsbury Group enthusiasts it has some delicious thumbnail sketches of the principals, as well as even floor plans of the rooms at the Hogarth Press, showing who was cooped up where. Full marks to Hesperus Press for bringing this delightful book back into print.

© Roy Johnson 2011

Buy the book at Amazon UK

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Richard Kennedy, A Boy at the Hogarth Press, London: Hesperus Press, 2011, pp.90, ISBN 1843914611


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Filed Under: Bloomsbury Group, Hogarth Press Tagged With: Biography, Bloomsbury Group, Cultural history, Hogarth Press

Adrian Stephen

February 4, 2013 by Roy Johnson

lesser-known young member of the Bloomsbury Group

Adrian Stephen was born in 1883, the younger son of biographer Leslie Stephen and his wife Julia. His elder brother Thoby Stephen (b. 1880) died of typhoid in 1906, His elder sister was the artist Vanessa Bell (b. 1879), and his younger sister was the novelist Virginia Woolf (b. 1882).

Adrian Stephen - portrait

His mother was the niece of the Victorian photographer Julia Margaret Cameron, and she had previously been married to the publisher Herbert Duckworth, As a consequence Adrian had as half brothers George and Gerald Duckworth, both of whom were part of the large family that lived at Hyde Park Gate in Kensington. His father had also been married before – to the daughter of William Makepeace Thackery.

Adrian was thought to be the particular favourite of his mother, and he was very distressed when she died suddenly in 1895 following an attack of influenza. He was very much the baby of the family, and felt overshadowed by his charismatic elder brother. Even when he suddenly grew to become six feet five inches tall in his teens, he developed a chacteristic stoop, as if he could not cope with his height.

He was educated at Westminster, the famous public school attached to Westminster Abbey in the centre of London. From there he went on to Trinity College Cambridge, and like his brother began to train to be a lawyer. But he gave this up, hoping to become an actor instead.

When their father Sir Leslie died in 1904, the old Victorian family house in Kensington was sold and the Stephen children moved to Gordon Square in Bloomsbury, which at that time was considered a distinctly unfashionable part of London. The four Stephen siblings enjoyed living a slightly bohemian life, and Adrian had the advantage of meeting the celebrated friends of his elder bother who were invited to discuss art, literature, and philosophy on Thursday evenings.

He met E.M.Forster, Clive Bell (who married his sister Vanessa) and David Garnett, plus the artist Duncan Grant. Among other visitors were the philosopher Bertrand Russell, the economist John Maynard Keynes, and Leonard Woolf, who married his other sister Virginia. This was the collection of friends which eventually became known as the Bloomsbury Group.

In 1910 Adrian took part in what became known as the ‘Dreadnought Hoax’. A group of people that included Adrian and his sister Virginia dressed up in Arab clothes and passed themselves off as a party of royal Abyssinian visitors making an inspection on board the warship HMS Dreadnought. Adrian acted as ‘interpreter’ to the group, who spoke to their hosts in a gibberish mixture of Latin and Greek.

When the prank was uncovered, there was a scandal and calls were made for the ringleaders to be arrested – but it was discovered that they had not broken any law. It is an interesting footnote to history that one invented phrase they used to express vigorous approval of the military equipment they were shown was “Bunga! Bunga!” – which became popular thereafter.

In 1909 Adrian began an affair with Duncan Grant, who was Lytton Strachey‘s cousin, but shortly before the first world war he married Karin Costelloe, a philosophy graduate from Newnham College, Cambridge. As conscientious objectors, they spent the war years working on a dairy farm.

They were friends via the Bloomsbury Group with another branch of the Strachey family – James Strachey and his wife Alix, who were the first translators of Freud into the English language, and the first professionally qualified and practising psychoanalysts in Britain. This enthusiasm rubbed off onto Adrian and Karin, and after the war they both decided to become analysts, an ambition fulfilled for Adrian in 1926 after completing a medical degree.

Like other members of the Bloomsbury Group, Adrian had been a pacifist during the first world war, but sickened by the brutality of the Germans during the second, he changed his stance and volunteered for medical service. He served actively as an army doctor at the age of sixty. He died in 1948, after which his wife committed suicide.


The Bloomsbury GroupThe 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 in the early part of the twentieth century. 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.

Adrian Stephen Buy the book at Amazon UK
Adrian Stephen Buy the book at Amazon US


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’.

Adrian Stephen

© Roy Johnson 2000-2014


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Filed Under: Bloomsbury Group Tagged With: Adrian Stephen, Bloomsbury Group, Cultural history, Psychoanalysis

All Passion Spent

February 1, 2016 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, critical commentary, plot, and study resources

All Passion Spent first appeared in 1931 under the imprint of the Hogarth Press, the independent publishing house run by Leonard Woolf and his wife Virginia. Vita Sackville-West had been Virginia Woolf’s lover and they remained good friends, yet they were rivals in literary popularity. Readers today might be surprised to know that Vita Sackville-West’s work around this time sold more copies than that of Virginia Woolf. Sackville-West had best-sellers with The Edwardians (1930) All Passion Spent (1931), and Family History (1932) all of which which portrayed English upper-class manners and life in a critical and often satirical manner.

All Passion Spent


All Passion Spent – critical commentary

Biographical interpretation

Two years before the publication of this novel Vita Sackville-West had suffered the emotional shock of losing her beloved home at Knole when her younger brother inherited the title of Baron Sackville-West on the death of their father. She was passionately attached to the ancestral home, which was known as a calendar home – with 365 rooms, 52 staircases, 12 entrances, and 7 courtyards. It was a disappointment, but the traditional laws of primogeniture meant that inheritance passed automatically to the eldest male heir – both property and title.

As a form of compensation for this disappointment, Vita Sackville-West and her husband Harold Nicolson bought the run down castle at Sissinghurst (Kent) and began its restoration into what is now a world-renowned country house and gardens. This experience might account for the issues of inheritance, property, and the attachment to particular houses that forms the substance of All Passion Spent.

Sackville-West is exploring the issues of spiritual empathy that Virginia Woolf had outlined in Mrs Dalloway (1925). Woolf’s principal characters Clarissa Dalloway and Septimus Smith never meet each other, but their thoughts and attitudes are linked through a series of literary symbols and congruence of attitude, such that when Septimus-Smith commits suicide at the end of the novel, Clarissa Dalloway understands completely why he has done so.

Deborah, Lady Slane, and Mr FitzGeorge have a similar relationship – except the understanding is on his part. He had been struck by her (even ‘fallen in love with her’) as a younger woman when they met in India – he a rich young traveller, and she the wife of the Viceroy. Forty years later he meets her and in an amazing frank and revealing conversation explains how he understands the sacrifices she has made in her life – abandoning her aspirations to be a painter in order to become the wife of a politician.

FitzGeorge is a rich and spoilt bachelor who collects art objects, and Lady Slane is the wife of a very successful politician and diplomat, yet this scene is the artistic highpoint of the novel. Sackville-West does not supply any evidence as to how or why FitzGeorge should have this special insight into Lady Slane’s personal ‘tragedy’ (after all, he is a crusty old private bachelor) but if we as readers are prepared to suspend our disbelief, this is a plea for intuitive understanding and sympathetic recognition of shared values that transcends gender, class, and age group.

This notion is reinforced by the concluding scene of the novel when Lady Slane’s great grand-daughter reveals that she rejects the family’s greedy and acquisitive values and wishes to be a musician. Lady Slane sees her own early life reflected in the girl’s aspirations and feels reassured that this alternative, independent system of values is still alive – even though she dies at this point in the narrative.

Feminism

The feminist notions which pervade the novel should be easily apparent to most readers. Lady Slane has the glimmer of aspiration to an independent existence which comes to her as a young woman. She has the idea of becoming a painter. So far as we know, she does not make a single brush-stroke across a canvas – so there is no evidence that she is in possession of any creative potential: the whole idea goes unexamined. But this is not the point. Any such aspirations are completely ignored by the weight of family and social conventions which force her into a marriage.

Sackville-West does not take a simplistic attitude to this situation. Deborah Lee (to give Lady Slane her maiden name) does not love the man she marries, but she has a reasonably happy married life, has a large family, and is successful as wife to the Viceroy to India, but her socially unacknowledged personal ambition is rather like the grit in the oyster which produces the pearl that is her vision of an alternative life.

Satire

Sackville-West offers a vision of upper-class life that spares no criticism or satirical edge. The novel begins with a six page eulogy to the Earl of Slane who has just died, detailing his public service to parliamentary life in way that makes it quite clear he is a an unthinking nonentity who has done nothing in his life except what the tradition of his class laid before him.

Lady Slane has done the same thing during her lifetime, but the point of the novel is that she had the spark of something more creative within her. She has suppressed this impulse whilst raising her family, but she makes a bold move to express it at the end of her life when she has the opportunity, and she is happy to see the same seeds of creativity in her great-grand-daughter just before she dies.

This criticism of class attitudes extends to the whole Holland family. Lord Slane didn’t even like his children and his wife only felt sympathetic to two of them – the eccentric bachelor Fay and the awkward visionary Edith. But the rest of their children, all conventionally married, are revealed as grasping and hypocritical toadies who pretend to be concerned for their ageing mother but actually do not want the responsibility of looking after her for entirely selfish reasons.


All Passion Spent – study resources

All Passion Spent All Passion Spent – Paperback – Amazon UK
All Passion Spent All Passion Spent – Paperback – Amazon US

All Passion Spent All Passion Spent – (Kindle) – Amazon UK
All Passion Spent All Passion Spent – (Kindle) – Amazon US

All Passion Spent All Passion Spent – DVD – Amazon UK
All Passion Spent All Passion Spent – DVD – Amazon US


All Passion Spent – chapter summaries

Part I

On the death of Henry Holland, the Earl of Slane, the members of his large family are faced with the problem of what to do with their elderly mother, whom they regard as rather simple-minded. They discuss the issue of inheritance in a greedy and competitive manner, all the time protesting their lack of self-interest. They pretend to welcome the responsibility of looking after their mother, which they all secretly wish to evade.

The elderly bachelor son Kay Holland has dinner with an old friend FitzGeorge, who knew Lady Slane in India. There are preparations for a funeral in Westminster Abbey, during which time the mother assumes an unusual degree of authority. After the funeral she suddenly announces that she wants to live in a little house in Hampstead she saw thirty years before – and she doesn’t want any grand-children or her great-grand-children visiting. The family are all shocked – except Edith, who is delighted.

The mother gives away all her jewellery to her eldest son and his wife. She then travels by tube to Hampstead thinking about her late husband and how he didn’t really like his children, except for Edith. She feels a quasi-mystic union with the empty and dilapidated house. The eccentric owner Mr Bucktrout has similar ideas to those of Lady Slane on enjoying old age and avoiding young people. He approves of her as a tenant and is almost reluctant to set the rent.

The family are horrified by the casual nature of this tenancy. Lady Slane and her maid Genoux get on well with the craftsman Mr Gersheron, and Mr Bucktrout begins to present Lady Slane with flowers. They discuss his theories about the imminent demise of the world.

She realises that she has lived at one remove from understanding the world, but now feels more relaxed about it. She rejects the idea of strife and competition, and wishes only to enjoy the support and comforting presence she feels with Mr Bucktrout and Mr Gershon.

Part II

Lady Slane luxuriates in the comfort and solitude of the house and its garden. She looks back on her life and examines the forces that have shaped it. As a girl of seventeen she had a romantic ambition to be a painter, but under family and social pressures she became engaged to Henry Holland. The preparations for their marriage were like an arcane ritual which left her completely puzzled.

At the time, she was not in love with Henry, and she was very conscious that he would continue to enjoy all the freedoms of masculine life, whilst she would gain nothing as a woman except the responsibility of being eternally on hand to look after him. Nevertheless, she felt that she could not escape the weight of expectations placed upon her.

Henry became a faithful and patronising husband, and she became a devoted wife, even though she sacrificed all her ambition to fulfil her role as a wife and mother. She now wonders about the foundation of her own individuality, as a separate entity to her husband, and she questions the relative values of the life he has offered her and the potential life that he has taken away from her. Apart from her favourites Kay and Edith she feels that all her other children belong to Henry.

Part III

Lady Slane lives in seclusion in the Hampstead house with her maid Genoux. Her relatives call infrequently and great-grandchildren are more or less forbidden. She receives a visit from Kay’s friend Mr FitzGeorge who flatters her and brags about his collection of precious objects. He appreciates her almost as a work of art in her own right. He recalls their meeting in India and confesses that he fell in love with her, then moves on to criticise her husband. He reveals to her the truth about the sacrifice she has made in marrying. She admits that he is right, and they agree to remain friends.

Kay Holland notices that his friend FitzGeorge isn’t at the club so often, and is glad that he has stopped asking for an introduction to Lady Slane. But then FitzGeorge suddenly dies, leaving his valuable collection of art objects to Lady Slane. The family members immediately assemble with offers to ‘help’ her, their covetousness and self-interest flimsily masked by a completely insincere pretence of concern. Lady Slane consults Mr Brooktrout and devises a plan to donate the treasures to the nation’s museums.

The family are horrified. Lady Slane remains at a distance from them and keeps track of their doings via the services of a press-cuttings agency. Finally, she is visited by her great grand-daughter who bears her own name and wants to be a musician, rejecting the family’s conventional values. The two of them share an appreciation of independently-generated values and an understanding of each other which spans the generations. Following this meeting of minds Lady Slane dies at the age of eighty-eight.


All Passion Spent – characters
Henry Holland the Earl of Slane, who has just died
Deborah, Lady Slane his widow
Kay Holland elderly son of the family, a bachelor
Mr FitzGeorge his friend, a bachelor art collector
William Holland another son, frugal and stingy
Lavinia William’s equally frugal wife
Genoux Lady Slane’s French maid
Mr Bucktrout eccentric owner of the Hampstead house
Mr Gorshon an eccentric craftsman and builder
Deborah Lee Lady Slane’s great-grand-daughter

© Roy Johnson 2016


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Filed Under: Vita Sackville-West Tagged With: Bloomsbury Group, English literature, Literary studies, Vita Sackville-West

Among the Bohemians

July 11, 2009 by Roy Johnson

unconventional ways of living: 1900-1940

For almost half a lifetime I have marvelled at the way Bloomsbury bohemians organised their private lives. Switching partners, even sexes in their life choices? They took it in their stride. Menage a trois? Easy-peasy. Menage a quatre? Can be done. How on earth did they manage it? Virginia Nicholson’s Among the Bohemians is largely an answer to that question. She looks in detail at the way bohemian English people (largely artists and writers) organised their lives in what we would now call an ‘alternative’ manner and went out of their way to live La Vie Boheme.

Among the Bohemians It’s an enormously entertaining book, packed with anecdotes on every page and written by the daughter of Quentin Bell, who was the son of Vanessa Bell, who in her turn was Virginia Woolf’s sister. This is a very telling provenance. She deals fairly comprehensively with her relatives and friends from the Bloomsbury Group about whom we already know a great deal, but the other figures who feature strongly are Augustus John, Eric Gill, Dylan Thomas, Robert Graves, plus minor figures such as Nina Hamnett, Betty May, Mark Gertler, and Ethel Mannin.

The book is arranged around a clever structural device which abandons a chronological narrative and instead bases chapters on themes. How did they cope with money and poverty? How did they arrange their sex lives? How should children be raised? What was their line on interior decor? This makes for a lively read.

The general picture which emerges is that of a group of upper middle class people who decided to kick against the stifling mores of late-Victorian and Edwardian society. Many of them were spoilt toffs and talented wasters who were merely playing at being Bohemian, and there is a distinct theme of nostalgie de la boue in some of the more extreme cases – but given the period, at least they were having a serious tilt at convention.

Some such as Virginia Woolf and Leonard Woolf, Lytton Strachey, Duncan Grant managed to combine unorthodox behaviour with a certain degree of professional success. But others slummed it, cadged drinks, or in the case of Dylan Thomas, stole other people’s shirts.

There is a particularly good chapter on interior design in which she analyses the various phases of Bohemian domestic aesthetics – from what Osbert Lancaster satirised as ‘First Russian Ballet Period’ to what she calls (poking fun at the Omega Group) ‘Jumble Sale chic’. Many of these fashions are still with us, though of course they no longer seem shocking, as they did at the time. This was a period in which even brightly coloured crockery was considered outré.

On the downside, some of them do not come off well out of her account: Ottoline Morrell taking two baths a year; Wyndham Lewis writing to his benefactor ‘Where’s the fucking stipend?’; Ruthven Todd stealing from the Grigsons who were supporting him; Augustus John neglecting his children; Eric Gill having sex with his. Much of it was not very politically correct – and that’s putting it mildly.

But her account is much more than gossip and amusing anecdotes, for she includes lots of well-digested social history on topics such as servants, the introduction of tinned food, and the price of wine and restaurant meals, This was the period which started cross dressing, make-up and smoking for women, occasional nude bathing, barefoot children left unsupervised, and for some of the hard cases, taking drugs.

It’s also a fully scholarly piece of work with properly referenced citations, notes on all the major and minor characters, and a huge bibliography. She has done us all the favour of reading the memoirs, the novels, and the journalism of all these now half-forgotten people – Gerald Brenan, Ethel Mannin, Roy Campbell – and digesting their experiences in a most delightful way.

She is perfectly aware that many of them were failed artists and part-time bohemians, well-to-do people who were playing at Artistic Life. And yet she can see that in the context of a world which served up boiled cabbage and stewed prunes with custard, a group which opted for wine, olives, and cooking with garlic represented the choice of Life.

I might be susceptible to literary and more particularly Bloomsbury gossip, but I found this book a real page turner. For me it will stay close at hand as a valuable source of reference to the period 1900—1940, and maybe even as an inspiration if I ever feel like being penniless but happy.

© Roy Johnson 2004

Among the Bohemians   Buy the book at Amazon UK

Among the Bohemians   Buy the book at Amazon US


Virginia Nicholson, Among the Bohemians, London: Penguin Books, 2003, pp.362, ISBN: 014028978X


Among the Bohemians – video lecture


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Filed Under: Bloomsbury Group, Lifestyle Tagged With: Among the Bohemians, Biography, Bloomsbury Group, Bohemianism, Lifestyle

Bertrand Russell biography

September 21, 2009 by Roy Johnson

philosopher, writer, peace campaigner

Bertrand Russell - portraitBertrand Russell (1872-1970) was an unusual mixture of a popular and an academic philosopher. He was the inventor of The Theory of Descriptions. Like many philosophers he made his major contributions whilst quite young with The Principles of Mathematics (1903) and he followed this later with The Analysis of Mind (1921) and An Enquiry into Meaning and Truth (1940).

He was born the grandson of Lord John Russell, who had twice served as Prime Minister under Queen Victoria. Educated at first privately, and later at Trinity College, Cambridge. In 1894 he obtained first class degrees both in mathematics and in the moral sciences. The same year he got married to Alys Pearsall Smith, an American Quaker, who was the first of his four wives.

Like many others of his generation who attended Cambridge he was influenced by G.E. Moore and his Principia Ethica (1903) which propounded the principals of ‘the pleasures of human intercourse and the enjoyment of beautiful objects’ which inspired many of the Bloomsbury Group.

In 1904 he went to teach at Harvard, where T.S.Eliot became one of his students. Their paths continued to run in close parallel when both became members of the Bloomsbury Group – and closer still when Russell started an affair with Eliot’s new wife Vivienne.

He was a regular visitor at Garsington, the country estate of Lady Ottoline Morrell with whom he had a long affair. [Mischievous commentators point out that she only had two baths a year, and he suffered from halitosis.] It was there that he also met D.H.Lawrence with whom he had a fairly virulent falling out. Their spat over existential matters led Russell to contemplating suicide. The same combination of attraction and male rivalry also affected his relationship with one of his star pupils, Ludwig Wittgenstein. In 1921 he divorced and married for the second time to Dora Black, with whom he set up a progressive school.

Later in life he wrote a series of popular books which were essays and reflections on topics such as liberty, freedom, censorship. Most of his popular writing is humane, stylish, and easy to read. Many modern attitudes we now take for granted – tolerance, liberal humanism, questioning of authority – were first articulated in collections such as The Conquest of Happiness, In Praise of Idleness, and Why I Am Not a Christian.

During the late 1920s and early 1930s, as his marriage to Dora broke down and as he lost faith in Beacon Hill, Russell continued to write books intended to emancipate readers from what he saw as the fetters of outmoded religious belief, restrictive marriages, repressed attitudes towards human sexuality, and authoritarian education practices.

In 1936 he married for the third time to Patricia (Peter) Helen Spence. While teaching in the United States in the late 1930s, Russell was offered a teaching appointment at City College, New York. The appointment was revoked following a large number of public protests and a judicial decision which stated that he was morally unfit to teach at the College.

Along with George Orwell, Russell was one of the few Western intellectuals on the Left not to be seduced by the claims of Marxist theory and Bolshevik practice in Russia. He retained his beliefs in non-violent resistance to wars until the aggressive expansionism of Hitler in Poland in 1939 compelled him to abandon his peace advocacy. He spent the Second World War in America where he wrote his most popular work, History of Western Philosophy.

He was awarded the Nobel prize for literature in 1950, divorced Peter Spence in 1952 and married for the fourth time to Edith Finch. In the 1960s he also embraced the cause of nuclear disarmament and was a prominent member of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND). He died of influenza at his home in Merioneth, Wales in 1970.


Bertrand Russell - biographyAs Ray Monk’s excellent biography of Russell makes clear, 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).


Bertrand Russell


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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Filed Under: Bloomsbury Group Tagged With: Bertrand Russell, Biography, Bloomsbury Group, Cultural history, Philosophy

Bloomsbury Art and Design

August 6, 2009 by Roy Johnson

painting, illustration, ceramics, interior design

The Bloomsbury Group included a number of painters and designers who had an important influence on the visual and decorative arts during the period of English modernism (1905—1930). The group included artists Vanessa Bell and her husband Clive Bell; the artist and critic (and Vanessa Bell’s lover) Roger Fry; the artist (and Vanessa Bell’s lifetime companion) Duncan Grant, plus painters Dora Carrington and Mark Gertler. Bloomsbury art and design was never a coherent movement with an agreed set of theories: it was a close-knit group of friends who shared an interest in aesthetics.

The following publications deal with the amazingly wide range of their art in its pure and applied manifestations. These range from easel paintings, public commissions, interior designs, book illustrations, furniture and tapestries, plus the celebrated wall decorations at Charleston.

Bloomsbury Art and DesignThe Art of Bloomsbury features the paintings and drawings of artists Roger Fry, Vanessa Bell, and Duncan Grant – three of the central figures of the Bloomsbury Group. There are entries on two hundred works of art, all illustrated in colour, which bring out the chief characteristics of Bloomsbury painting – domestic, contemplative, sensuous, and essentially pacific. These are seen in landscapes, portraits, and still lifes set in London, Sussex, and the South of France. The volume also features the abstract painting and applied art that placed these artists at the forefront of the avant-garde before the First World War. There are portraits of family and friends – from Virginia Woolf and Maynard Keynes to Aldous Huxley and Edith Sitwell. Essays by leading scholars provide further insights into the works and the changing critical reaction to them.
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Bloomsbury Art and DesignBloomsbury Rooms: Modernism, Subculture, and Domesticity is a scholarly study which traces the development of Bloomsbury’s domestic aesthetic from the group’s influential Post-Impressionism in Britain around 1910 through to the 1930s. Christopher Reed makes detailed studies of rooms and environments created by Virginia Woolf’s sister Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant, and Roger Fry, and he puts them into the context of aesthetic debates of the period. His study challenges the accepted notion that these artists drifted away from orthodox modernism. Whatever you think of the book’s theoretical arguments, it’s a beautifully illustrated production, full of fascinating paintings, fabrics, decoration, interior design, and original graphics.
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Bloomsbury Art and DesignThe 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, and didn’t even bother signing her own works. This book aims to redress the balance by looking at the immense range of her work. She produced portraits, landscapes, glass paintings, letter illustrations and decorative work – all illustrated here in full colour. It also acts as an introduction to the artist herself, with rare photographs helping form a fuller picture of this fascinating woman.
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Bloomsbury Art and DesignThe Bloomsbury Artists: Prints and Book Designs This 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. Many of these were produced as part of the movement for modern design established by the Omega Workshops.
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Bloomsbury Art and DesignVision and Design is a collection of Roger Fry’s best articles and writings. It had a significant impact on the art world in the 1920s and 1930s. Unlike many critics and scholars of the time, Fry expanded his discussion on art outside of the Western world, even to the degree of contending that primitive sculpture surpasses that of the West. As well as Western art, the book examines the use of form and aesthetics in ethnic art from Africa, America and Asia. It reinforced his position as a critic and it is still recognised as an extremely influential work in the development of modernist theory.
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Bloomsbury Art and DesignCharleston: A Bloomsbury House and Garden by Quentin Bell and Virginia Nicolson encapsulates the artistic sensibility of the Bloomsbury Group. It is an illustrated record of the farmhouse at Charleston in Sussex which Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant treated as a blank canvas in interior design. In doing so, they created a treasury of Bloomsbury art. The book provides family memories and anecdotes drawn from a lifetime’s experience. Each room links the interiors with some of the leading cultural figures of the 20th century, plus guests such as Vanessa’s sister Virginia Woolf and Lytton Strachey. Specially commissioned photographs portray the essence of the Bloomsbury style both throughout the house, with its painted furniture and walls, plus decorative items, paintings, and objects in the garden.
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Bloomsbury Art and DesignThe Art of Duncan Grant In addition to being a central figure in the Bloomsbury group, Duncan Grant played a leading role in the establishment of modernist art in Britain. His principal works were easel paintings, but he also produced murals, fabric designs, theatre and ballet work, illustration and print-making, and commercial interior decoration. Throughout a long life Duncan Grant continued to experiment with and adapt to new styles and techniques, and this book offers an opportunity to grasp the extent of his achievement. It examines the influence that people and places had on him and demonstrates, with more than a hundred illustrations of his work, the range of his talent. It’s been said that he was as polymorphous in his work as he was in his much-discussed private life.
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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’.

© Roy Johnson 2000-2014


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Filed Under: Art, Bloomsbury Group, Lifestyle Tagged With: Art, Bloomsbury Group, Bloomsbury rooms, Charleston, Dora Carrington, Duncan Grant, Graphic design, Interior design

Bloomsbury Group portraits

July 19, 2009 by Roy Johnson

excellent illustrated exhibition catalogue

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

Bloomsbury Group portraits The paintings are supplemented by some quite rare photographs – most of which I suspect came from the National Portrait Gallery for which this publication was once an exhibition catalogue. The characters portrayed are what might be called the usual suspects: Leonard Woolf, Virginia Woolf, Lytton Strachey, Duncan Grant, Vanessa Bell, Ottoline Morrell, John Maynard Keynes, Bertrand Russell, and Dora Carrington, for instance.

It was amusing to note that throughout the pages, Lytton Strachey seems to be in a state of permanent horizontal recline, lounging in a succession of deckchairs and armchairs, which the accompanying text maintains was ‘conducive to a life of intense mental activity’ – forgetting that Virginia Woolf, a far more productive author, often wrote standing up.

The biographical sketches themselves are an entertaining mixture of historical fact, contextualisation, and discreetly gossipy personal details. They also comment on the painted portraits too – so we get an element of psychological interpretation as well.

I was fascinated by some of the small details – such as Lytton Strachey re-naming Reginald Partridge Ralph; E.M.Forster setting fire to his trousers when visiting Virginia Woolf; Frances Partridge modelling creations by Issey Miyake; and an aged Gerald Brenan being kidnapped from an old people’s home in Pinner and taken back to die in his spiritual home in southern Spain.

This is an excellent introduction for newcomers, and there is enough novelty to keep regular Bloomsbury fans interested too. All the paintings and photographs are beautifully reproduced, and the book is well designed and printed. It’s become a best-seller on this site.

© Roy Johnson 2005

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Frances Spalding, The Bloomsbury Group, London: National Portrait Gallery, 2005, pp.108, ISBN 1855143518


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Bloomsbury Group web links

September 17, 2009 by Roy Johnson

Bloomsbury Group – further study resources

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’.


Bloomsbury Group web links

© Roy Johnson 2000-2014


Bloomsbury Group - Click for details at AmazonThe 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.


The Bloomsbury Artists - Click for details at AmazonThe Bloomsbury Artists: Prints and Book Designs This 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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Bloomsbury Portraits and Biographies

November 28, 2009 by Roy Johnson

selected and recommended reading

Bloomsbury PortraitsBloomsbury Portraits is an updated and redesigned edition of Richard Shone’s study of the painters of the Bloomsbury group. Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant were at the centre of the interplay of personal and intellectual life that characterised the group and to whom the Bloomsbury writers often sat for portraits. As a friend of Duncan Grant at the end of his long life and as a frequent visitor to Charleston, Bloomsbury expert Richard Shone is well placed to dispel many of the myths and misconceptions that surround their work.
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The Bloomsbury GroupThe 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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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. Later he bought out her shares and became a full business partner of Leonard Woolf – remaining a close friend of the couple throughout their lives. 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’. This is an attractive and very accessible introduction to the writer and her intellectual milieu.
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Among the BohemiansAmong 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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Virginia Woolf - a biographyVirginia Woolf, a biography by Hermione Lee is strongly recommended if you would prefer something more advanced and intellectually demanding. It assumes you know the general background to her life and the Bloomsbury group. Lee writes from an academic perspective, and extricates Woolf from clichs about madness and modernism to reveal a vigorous artist whose work is politically probing as well as psychologically delicate. This is one for the serious literary scholar – but it’s nevertheless very readable.
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Vanessa Bell - a biographyVanessa Bell, Francis Spalding’s excellent biography, sets out a portrait of this complex and talented woman who sacrificed a great deal of her time and efforts to looking after other people. She managed to stay on friendly terms with her lover, her husband, and her ex-lover – and to keep them friendly with each other. At the same time she was an active member of the Omega workshops, and her work in painting and the applied arts has been increasingly appreciated in the period since her death in 1961.
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South from GranadaSouth from Granada is a travel writing classic in which the writer and cultural historian Gerald Brenan describes setting up home in a remote Spanish village in the 1920s. He has a marvellous grasp of geography; he captures the rugged atmosphere of the region; and he has a particularly detailed knowledge of botany. Local characters and customs are vividly recounted. Bloomsbury enthusiasts will be delighted by his hilarious accounts of visits made by Lytton Strachey (on a donkey) and Virginia Woolf under very difficult conditions, as well as a meeting with Roger Fry in Almeria.
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E.M.Forster: A LifeE.M.Forster: A Life is a readable and well illustrated biography by P.N. Furbank. This book has been much praised for the sympathetic understanding Nick Furbank brings to Forster’s life and work, as well as to his relationships with other members of the Bloomsbury Group. He produced his now-classic novels whilst he was quite young, gave up writing fiction, and devoted his later years to political essays and literary criticism. This is also a very scholarly book, with plenty of fascinating details of the English literary world during Forster’s surprisingly long life. Very well written too.

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The Life of Dora CarringtonA Life of Dora Carrington 1893-1932 Because of her Bohemian lifestyle, her connection with the Bloomsbury group, her bobbed hair, and her outspoken views, Dora Carrington seemed to symbolize the ‘new woman’ of the twentieth century. This is a portrait of the woman who was once described as ‘a strange wild beast’. She was a talented painter who had affairs with both men and women, and she devoted a great deal of the latter part of her life to looking after Lytton Strachey until she committed suicide when he died. Very popular with readers.
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Portrait of a MarriagePortrait of a Marriage is a double biography of Vita Sackville-West and her husband Harold Nicolson, written by their son Nigel. It is based on an autobiographical manuscript found after Vita’s death and describes the 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, particularly Sackville-West’s passionate affair with Violet Trefussis.

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Ottoline Morrell - biography: Life on a Grand ScaleOttoline Morrell: Life on a Grand Scale This biography reveals Ottoline Morrell, London’s leading literary hostess during the first three decades of the 20th century. Augustus John, the Asquiths, T.S. Eliot, D.H. Lawrence, Lytton Strachey, Virginia Woolf and W.B. Yeats enjoyed her hospitality – and she was Bertrand Russell’s mistress for many years. The book includes her lost correspondence with Strachey and Bertrand Russell’s 2500 letters to her. It also throws light on her curious marriage to Philip Morrell, and offers a new perspective on Britain’s artists and writers in the early 20th century.
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Bertrand Russell: 1872-1920 The Spirit of SolitudeBertrand Russell: 1872-1920 The Spirit of Solitude is the first volume of Ray Monk’s acclaimed biography of Bertrand Russell, covering the first 50 years of his life. It deals with his childhood, his early works including Principia Mathematica, his relationships with prominent contemporaries, his bizarre sex life, his conscientious objection in World War I, and his visits abroad. Russell was an active member of the Bloomsbury Group, and had tempestuous relationships with both men and women.

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Duncan Grant: A BiographyDuncan Grant – a Biography Francis Spalding’s book is the standard account of his life, which stretched from the Victorian age into the modern era. Duncan Grant was one of the best-known names on the British art scene and one of the most charismatic members of the Bloomsbury set. His life spanned great changes in society and art, from Edwardian times to the 1970s. Although he was a homosexual, he lived devotedly and worked throughout his life with fellow artist and former lover Vanessa Bell.
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Bloomsbury RecalledBloomsbury Recalled Quentin Bell was one of the last surviving members of the Bloomsbury circle. Here he offers a candid portrait gallery of major and peripheral Bloomsbury figures. His father,Clive Bell, married the author’s mother, Vanessa Stephen in 1907 but 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. 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, and Dame Ethel Smyth, the pipe-smoking lesbian composer, who fell in love with Virginia Woolf.
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Roger Fry - a biographyRoger Fry, Virginia Woolf’s authorised biography, traces the development of his aesthetic practice and theories – after first graduating in science from Cambridge. He was the oldest member of the Bloomsbury Group, and influenced much of its ideas concerning fine and decorative arts. In partnership with his one-time lover Vanessa Bell, he was the founder of the Omega workshop, and he became a leading art critic as well as a successful painter in his own right. Don’t expect any spicy personal details: Woolf concentrates on his aesthetic theories and his public life.
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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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Bloomsbury Recalled

May 22, 2009 by Roy Johnson

memoirs and portraits of Bloomsberries from an insider

Quentin Bell is the son of Clive Bell and Vanessa Bell, the nephew of Virginia Woof, and the friend of many of the major figures in the Bloomsbury Group. Bloomsbury Recalled is his scrapbook of reminiscences focused on some of its major figures, plus one or two minor characters many people will not have heard about. The first part of his memoir concerns his parents. He treads carefully between respect for their individuality and an objective account of their behaviour.

Bloomsbury Recalled This even stretches to his description of a turning point in family life when his mother, still married to his father Clive, but entangled in a romantic liaison with the artist Roger Fry, realises that she is actually in love with the homosexual Duncan Grant, with whom she spent the rest of her life. This seems to epitomise Bloomsbury lifestyles without a doubt.

He also deals in separate chapters with Duncan Grant and his proclivity for rough trade; David Garnett and his relationship with Quentin Bell’s own ‘sister’ Angelica – who was actually the daughter of Duncan Grant; John Maynard Keynes who switched from men to a Russian ballerina and whilst being an important economist also became a farmer and landholder, seeking to create a feudal aristocratic lineage out of nothing.

There are also some surprising details – Leonard Woolf teaching his visitors to play bowls and keeping a pet monkey; Desmond MacCarthy, like something out of a novel by George Meredith, a man with eternal promise who did not deliver; E.M.Forster setting his trousers on fire during a visit to the Woolfs at Monks House; and Matisse boring everybody rigid with his vanity and egoism on a visit to the Stracheys. He also supplies brief glimpses of minor figures such as the art critic and Soviet spy Anthony Blunt, and Ethyl Smyth, the pipe-smoking lesbian composer who fell in love with Virginia Woolf.

He writes with a rather touchingly old-fashioned naivety (‘Virginia broke her fast in bed’) and he certainly reaches into a rich lexicon of outdated terms (‘sodomy’, ‘catamite’, ‘buggery’, ‘pederast’) to describe the activities of Lytton Strachey and Maynard Keynes. He’s also good at bringing out contradictions which might surprise some people today – examples of great family wealth and yet Spartan living conditions, and upper class connections and yet socialist sympathies.

Don’t expect any rigour or consistency in chronology, place, or even subject. These are just personal memoirs built around themes – rather like an old jazz pianist sitting down and tinkling out variations on some of his favourite songs. He doesn’t even bother describing scandals if he has written about them elsewhere.

There are no scalding revelations here, but anyone who has the slightest interest in the Bloomsbury Group and its members will be grateful for a first-hand account which captures the flavours and textures of a bygone era which nevertheless has much still to teach us about the politics and the aesthetics of daily life and personal relationships.

© Roy Johnson 2000

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Quentin Bell, Bloomsbury Recalled, New York: Columbia University Press, 1995, pp.234, ISBN 0231105657


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Filed Under: Bloomsbury Group Tagged With: Biography, Bloomsbury, Bloomsbury Group, Modernism, Quentin Bell.

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