Cultural history Archives - Page 14 of 23

Saxon Sydney-Turner biography

December 1, 2010 by Roy Johnson

intellectual, aesthete, enigma, and civil servant

Saxon Sydney-Turner (1880-1962) is one of the lesser-known and more enigmatic figures in the Bloomsbury Group. Very little is known about his life – largely because he took a lot of trouble to keep much of it private. His father was a doctor who ran a home for mental patients at Hove near Brighton. As a child he attended Westminster School in London and then went on in 1899 to Trinity College Cambridge. There he met Clive Bell, Leonard Woolf, and Thoby Stephen, who had all arrived the same year. He was on the same staircase as Clive Bell, and he later shared rooms with Leonard Woolf, who described him as ‘an absolute prodigy of learning’.

He was introverted and ferociously intellectual, and was rarely seen by day at Cambridge, since he rose late and stayed up reading late into the night. Together with his new friends he was elected as a member of the not-so-secret society the Apostles. This met late at night to discuss cultural and philosophic matters – all its members deeply influenced by the ideas of G.E.Moore and his Principia Ethica (1903). However, Saxon Sydney-Turner is mainly remembered for his silences rather than any positive contribution to the debates.

He was interested in poetry, painted a little, and was a music lover with an especial liking for opera. He regularly attended the Wagner Ring cycles at Bayreuth. He loved puzzles, crosswords, riddles, and acrostics, and won one of the scholarships in Classics because he was able to identify and solve a riddle in the centre of an obscure Greek text which was set for translation.

In his finals he took a double first and did well enough in the Civil Service exams to gain a choice opening as a civil servant in the Treasury. He moved into the job and stayed there, working in obscurity for the rest of his life. Through his friendships with Leonard and Thoby, he became an accepted part (though a peripheral figure) in the Bloomsbury Group, though his reputation as an intellectual intimidated some of its members, and he sometimes exasperated his more outgoing contemporaries because he might turn up as one of their causeries, stay for sixteen hours, and say nothing.

He was modest, unassuming, and kind, but despite his formidable erudition people found him slightly infuriating because of his lack of drive and motivation. His friend Leonard Woolf described him as ‘an eccentric in the best English tradition who wrote elegant verse and music and possessed an extraordinary supple, and enigmatic mind’. And yet –

The rooms in which Saxon lived for many years in Great Ormond Street consisted of one big sitting room and a small bedroom. On each side of the sitting-room fireplace on the wall was an immense picture of a farmyard scene. It was the same picture on each side and for over thirty years Saxon lived with them for ever before his eyes while in his bedroom there were some very good pictures by Duncan Grant and other artists, but you could not possibly see them because there was no light and no space to hang them on the walls.

Unlike many of his Bloomsbury friends, he was not at all sexually active. He did fall in love with Barbara Hiles, a former Slade student who was a friend of Dora Carrington. When she revealed that she was going to marry Nick Bagenal but could retain Saxon as a potential lover, he wrote to say that he felt unable to share her with somebody else. However, he did manage to reconcile himself to the loss and remained a close friend to Barbara Hiles and her children – indeed the friendship lasted longer than the Bagenal’s marriage.

When Lytton Strachey moved into the Mill House at Tidmarch with Dora Carrington, Saxon had a £20 a year stake in it for occasional use, though Gerald Brenan‘s account of his visits there illustrates why he described him as ‘one of the greatest bores I have ever known’.

he took to going every summer to Finland, coming back each time with a collection of snapshots that showed nothing but fir trees of varying heights and small railway stations. When he arrived at Lytton Strachey’s house for the weekend he would bring these photographs with him and one dreaded the moment when he would fetch them out and display them one by one, very slowly, in that muffled yet persistent voice of his, with brief comments: ‘I took that one of a railway station in the tundra because when I first went to Finland it had not been built.’

In later life developed a weakness for the horses – though he never went to any races. He gambled away almost all his modest savings and was forced to scrounge from neighbours for essentials. He ended his days in a small flat where he watched television on a set purchased for him by friends.

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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Twentieth century literature

Singled Out

April 7, 2010 by Roy Johnson

how two million women survived without men after the first world war

Before the First World War a single woman was expected to have one aim in life – to get married. But three-quarters of a million British soldiers were killed in that war, leaving not enough men to go round for a generation of what became known as ‘Surplus Women’. Virginia Nicholson is the author of the widely acclaimed Among the Bohemians: Experiments in Living 1900-1939. Her latest book Singled Out is a study which explores the extraordinary lives these ‘left-over’ women made for themselves. It tells how they challenged conventions, how they campaigned to better their lot, how they often coped with poverty, childlessness, and frustration. Above all, it shows how women proved that there is more to life than finding Mr Right.

It’s a work that skillfully combines real-life biographical studies, their reflection in imaginative fiction, plus a mercifully light dusting of historical and sociological statistics. Nicholson has selected her illustrative examples from as wide a social range as possible, but those which stand out are inevitably the middle and upper class women who have left a written record of their experiences.

The most memorable are Vera Brittain, Winifred Holtby, and novelists Rosamund Lehmann, Phyllis Bentley, and Christina Stead. But she has gone to a great deal of trouble to represent a wide spectrum of life stories, digging out working and service class biographies, and interviewing rare survivors of the period and its difficulties.

There are lots of inspiring stories – such as the skill and determination which took Beatrice Gordon Holmes from humble beginnings, via office accounts, to control of a senior company on the Stock Exchange.

The imbalance between available men and women persisted into the 1920s, and at some points the situation was regarded as so desperate that women were encouraged to emigrate to find husbands. After all, the colonies had not lost such a large proportion of its young men in the war. Young ‘gels’ were encouraged to join the ‘fishing fleet’ and trawl for a suitable huband abroad.

Women were caught in all sorts of double binds regarding their life chances. They were expected to have but one goal in life – marriage. But when most of the men went off to be slaughtered in the ‘Great War’ women were simultaneously expected to replace them in their jobs as laborourers, drivers, and munition workers, yet were looked down on (often by their married sisters) for ‘going out to work’. Then when the war ended they were criticised for occupying jobs meant for men. If they went into the only career paths open to women – nursing and teaching – they were expected to leave if they got married.

The unequal pay levels were the product of an ironic kind of double-think by the powers that be. Men must be paid more in order to support their families, ran the argument, and a single woman has only herself to support, but at the same time women must be deterred from breaking free of motherhood and the home. High remuneration would encourage the bachelor girl to escape her destiny as breeder of the race, so the differentials must be maintained in the interests of demographic stability.

If a single woman followed all these restrictive practices forced on her by the tradition of social prejudice, she could also end up being an unpaid carer to aged parents. Nicholson documents several heart-breaking instances cases of young women whose aspirations are totally crushed by demanding and self-centred mothers. Their stories, culled in old age from interviews conducted in nursing homes, read like the plots of Anita Brookner novels.

In focussing so intently on questions of personal fulfillment, it’s impossible for Nicholson to escape the issue of sex in a spinster’s life – but she skates across it as rapidly as possible, pausing only to include mention that some women did actually admit to having ‘urges’.

Fortunately she does much better in covering the topic of lesbianism – which was euphemistically known in the inter-war years as ‘Uranism’ (a term coined by Edward Carpenter). Radclyffe Hall is the stand-out figure here, partly because of her flamboyant appearance and behaviour, and partly because of the scandalous Well of Loneliness trial. But Nicholson also adds many other examples of lifelong happiness found in women’s same-sex partnerships – by Sylvia Townsend Warner, Mary Renault, and Angela du Maurier (Daphne’s elder sister).

She finishes with a clutch of biographical sketches illustrating the extraordinary achievements amongst this generation of women who fell out of the marriage market following the husband shortage caused by the carnage of the First World War. Some went on to be qualified engineers, university teachers, leaders of political movements, aviators, doctors, archeologists, members of parliament, and even in one case the curator of London Zoo.

Miss Eve Balfour … discovered that eating compost-grown vegetables cured her rheumatism [and] began her experiments with organic cultivation. Her book The Living Soil (1943) was the influential text behind the formation of the Soil Association, which she co-founded in 1946. Not content with her role in this (literally) ground-breaking project, Lady Eve played saxophone in her own dance band, passed her pilot’s licence in 1931, crewed sailing ships and wrote successful detective novels. ‘I am just surprised to see that what I stood for all my life is no longer derided but more or less accepted’, she remarked at the age of ninety.

Nicholson argues very persuasively that these women paved the way for the radical feminists of the last few decades. But unlike their sisters of the contemporary world, their achievements were solidly founded on the fact that they never married. This is a splendid piece of documentary writing and social history which provides sympathetic insights into the difficulties and the triumphs experienced by young women as they dealt with the war and its tragic consequences.

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Virginia Nicholson, Singled Out: How Two Million Women Survived Without Men after the First World War, London: Penguin, 2008, pp.312, ISBN: 0141020628

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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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Small Things Considered

November 5, 2009 by Roy Johnson

reasons why there is no perfect design

Henry Petrowski is professor of civil engineering and history at Duke University, North Carolina. He writes extensively on engineering and design in a populist manner which helps to explain academic and scientific matters to the average reader. And he does it very well. He has a fluent and easy style which reads like someone talking to you over drinks on a veranda on a hot sunny afternoon. Small Things Considered is a good example of his work.

His main argument in this, one of his many books on the subject, is that considerations of design affect even the small matters of everyday life. And I mean small. Nothing is too insignificant in the running of a normal house to escape his attention – thirty pages on a glass of water, a whole chapter on coffee cup holders in cars, or on the design of paper bags. There’s even a chapter on the positioning of handles on doors.

The reason this is all spelled out at such length is that as part of his leisurely style, he looks at all the ways the design of something might have gone wrong, how the designers could have failed or overlooked some important requirement – before he goes on to look at the more essential element of how they got it right. Nevertheless, his sub-title is significant: even the best-designed objects can eventually be improved upon. As he points out, most patent applications carry ‘Improvement on …’ as part of their title.

The best parts of his accounts are where he delivers the history of a design or an invention, the practicalities of making something work and the financing of prototypes and commercial models. He’s also good the moment he strays into issues of patents, copyright, and ownership, because he obviously knows the history of his subject.

He waxes eloquently about very basic products such as duct tape, WD-40, and Teflon, pointing out just how much research and design went into these apparently simple items. Indeed, WD-40 even gets its name from the fact that the manufacturer’s previous thirty-nine attempts to develop a Water Displacement prototype had not been successful. It was the fortieth that delivered the goods – and then more so when people found all sorts of inventive uses for it. Now it is used for oiling squeaky hinges, loosening stubborn bolts, dissolving glue, and even killing insects.

The most successful chapters are those that consider the details of a specific and complex product. Office chairs are a good case in point. His account of how the Herman Miller Aeron displaced the Steelcase chair of the 1950s takes into account ergonomics, materials, design innovation, ecology, and even social attitudes, though curiously enough he doesn’t mention economics (the Aeron is formidably expensive – as I discovered when I tried to buy one recently).

This is a book to be read alongside Donald Norman’s The Design of Everyday Things and Victor Papanek’s Design for the Real World. It certainly warrants a place on the syllabus of any serious design course, though I doubt that it will reach the classic status of those other two texts, even though it attempts to do so.

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Henry Petrowski, Small Things Considered, New York: Vintage Books, 2003, pp.288, ISBN: 1400032938

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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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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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Sylvia Beach

September 14, 2018 by Roy Johnson

Sylvia Beach (1887-1962) was an American-born bookshop owner and publisher who emigrated to Paris and became a central figure in the expatriate community between the first and second world wars. She is best known as the owner of the bookstore Shakespeare and Company and as the publisher of James Joyce’s novel Ulysses (1922).

She was born in Baltimore, the daughter of a Presbyterian minister and the grand-daughter of missionaries. At birth she was christened Nancy Woodbridge Beach, but she adopted the name Sylvia later. In 1901 the family moved to France when her father was appointed a minister at the American Church in Paris.

Sylvia Beach

Sylvia Beach (left) with Adrienne Monnier

She spent the next few years living in Paris until the family moved back to America when her father became a minister in Princeton. However, she made return trips to France, then lived in Spain and later worked for the Red Cross in Serbia.

During the later years of the First World War she went back to Paris as a student of French literature. She had very little formal education, though by the time she finally settled in Paris in 1916 she could speak three foreign languages – French, Spanish, and Italian.

In 1917, at the age of thirty, she entered Adrienne Monnier’s bookshop, joined the lending library, and found the woman who became her lover and life partner. She also discovered her vocation and in 1919 opened her own bookshop as Shakespeare and Company in a nearby former laundry. The business functioned as both a bookshop and a lending library. Both women’s enterprises were financed by their parents.

“My loves were Adrienne Monnier and James Joyce and Shakespeare and Company”

Primed with customers from Monnier who were interested in English literature, the new bookshop was an immediate success. One of her first loyal customers was Valery Larbaud who later became a translator of James Joyce’s work. Other early subscribers included Andre Gide, Eric Satie, Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, and Joyce himself. Sylvia Beach formed an immediate bond with Joyce, who was then in the middle of writing Ulysses.

As far as the business was concerned, she was astonishingly inefficient. She kept almost no records, and didn’t even put prices on the books she was trying to sell. Hours were spent chatting to people who just happened to have called by – but she was well liked for being so receptive.

Beach took up the crusade on behalf of Joyce’s unpublished novel Ulysses when his principal benefactress Harriet Shaw Weaver failed to find people who would even set up the book in print.. It was considered ‘indecent’ by everyone – including Virginia Woolf.

When she decided to publish the novel herself she sent out publicity leaflets which had the interesting effect of attracting more American writers to visit her shop, eager for news of a work that was considered scandalous even before it was published. The visitors were also encouraged by a collapse of the Franc, which made living cheaper against the dollar.

Sylvia Beach poured all her time, money, and emotional resources into the production of Ulysses. Joyce sponged off her mercilessly – as he did off everyone else. The novel’s early years are now quite well known. It was vilified as ‘obscene’ and its author branded a ‘lunatic’. This only increased sales.

But not everyone was pleased. Gertrude Stein thought Shakespeare and Company was lowering the tone of the Left Bank by publishing indecent material. She also believed that the true genius of literary modernism was none other than her good self. She studiously avoided both Beach and Joyce at all cultural events.

Sylvia Beach

James Joyce

Beach stayed out of these social squabbles and concentrated on the task in hand. She began a game of cat and mouse with the authorities who wished to supress Joyce’s work. Copies of Ulysses were smuggled to America and England, and occasionally the customs officers would confiscate her parcels and destroy their contents. [My ‘old’ copy of the Bodley Head edition has this shameful record of prurient vandalism reproduced as a preface.]

She befriended more Americans in the next wave of expatriates – writer Ernest Hemingway and composers George Antheil and Aaron Copeland. In 1926 she brought out a fourth edition of Ulysses, which was printed with copies of revisions and corrections to the original text. Meanwhile Joyce had begun work on his next book Finnegans Wake which was to take him seventeen years to complete.

The cross-cultural fertilizations that took place in this period are well illustrated in the figure of John Dos Passos. He was a visitor to Sylvia Beach’s bookshop at the time he was writing Manhattan Transfer. He was naturally influenced by Ulysses, but he also met Soviet cinematographer Sergei Eisenstein with whom he discussed the techniques of collage, fast-cut editing, and montage, all of which he incorporated into his literary style.

Sylvia Beach

John Dos Passos

There was a small cloud on this endlessly sunny horizon when Ford Maddox Ford threatened to open a rival bookshop offering lower prices. Sylvia simply removed all his works from her own shop, his sales dropped, and his plans collapsed.

Whilst the fast sets of the Hemingways and the Scott Fitzgeralds passed their summers in month-long parties in Pamplona and Antibes, Sylvia and Adrienne retreated to an isolated farm in the Savoy mountains, living on fresh milk and sleeping in a hayloft.

By 1926 the American influence on Paris was in full spate. Josephine Baker was a succes de scandale in Le Revue Negre. Beach made her contributions to this fashion by organising a Walt Whitman exhibition and helping to promote the sensational performance of George Antheil’s Ballet Mechanique that ended in a riot.

But the American connection was not all sweetness and light. Samuel Roth, a notorious publisher in New York, brought out a pirated copy of Ulysses. The novel was not protected by copyright at this time because America had not signed the Bern agreement.

Sylvia Beach orchestrated an international protest, and meanwhile supported Joyce through gritted teeth when extracts from Work in Progress (which became Finnegans Wake) began to appear, much to general bewilderment. Harriet Weaver, his principal benefactress predicted that it would eventually become a ‘curiosity of literature’. History might prove her right.

In 1927 Beach’s mother was arrested in Paris on a charge of shoplifting in Galleries Lafayette. Rather than face the public humiliation of a trial, she committed suicide. Sylvia was devastated and, exhausted by her efforts to fight the Roth piracy, she put a little more distance between herself and Joyce.

Sylvia Beach

Ulysses – first edition

Around this time Samuel Beckett appeared and was added to the roster of unpaid ‘assistants’ to Joyce, who continued to cadge, borrow, and even steal money from anybody who had any.

This decade of license and excess – ‘The Roaring Twenties’ – came to an abrupt halt in October 1929 with the Wall Street crash. But not everyone suffered: Joyce continued to fund his lavish lifestyle with other people’s money and started the new age of austerity by biting the hand that had fed him for the previous ten years. He cheated Sylvia Beach out of the rights to Ulysses which she had gone to so much trouble to publish for him.

Yet with the burden of Ulysses removed, her financial position at the shop at first actually improved. But on the other hand, many of her expatriate American customers began returning to their homeland. The value of the dollar was falling, and European stormclouds were gathering. She was forced to sell off some of her precious first editions and manuscripts, and a ‘friends of Shakespeare and Company’ fund was established to keep the shop alive.

In 1936 Beach paid her first visit to America for twenty-two years. On return to Paris she found that a rival had moved in to live with her lover Adrienne. The political uncertainties of the late thirties were no good at all for business, and she only kept the shop going thanks to generous gifts from friends and a series of sponsored internships.

At the outbreak of war and the occupation of Paris by the Germans, Sylvia opted to stay put and keep the shop open. But when a Nazi officer threatened to close the business because she would not sell him a copy of Finnegans Wake, she hid her entire stock in an attic at the top of the building, where it remained throughout the war.

She was arrested in 1942 and interned at Vitell, later to be released following the influence of a friend in Vichy. At the liberation in 1944 she did not, contrary to popular myth, re-open the shop after it was ‘liberated’ by Ernest Hemingway. Instead, she organised help for her friends and began to write her memoirs.

Adrienne, her mentor, mother-figure, and lover committed suicide in 1955 to escape the double pains of rheumatism and Menieres disease. Beach lived on to establish a permanent home for her archive of Joyce materials at the State University of New York at Buffalo, and she died in her beloved Paris in 1962.

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Noel Riley Fitch, Sylvia Beach and the Lost Generation: A History of Literary Paris in the Twenties and Thirties, London: Penguin, 1985, pp. 447, ISBN:

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Talk to the Hand

October 20, 2009 by Roy Johnson

The Utter Bloody Rudeness of Everyday Life (or six good reasons to stay home and bolt the door)

Lynne Truss must surely be one of the next participants lined up ready for the TV show Grumpy Old Women – in which celebrity ladies of a certain age ventilate their pet grievances. First she was grumpy about failures of punctuation in Eats, Shoots & Leaves, and now in Talk to the Hand she is being grumpy about modern manners – or lack of them. Fortunately, her grumpiness is served up with generous helpings of witty exposition, well dramatised anecdote, and self-deprecating humour.

She rails against people who don’t say ‘Thank you’ when you hold open a door for them – but goes further by analysing the reasons for our social expectations and our reactions to them when thwarted. The same is true for people who let their children run amok in other people’s houses – and are affronted if you don’t share share their self-indulgent view of them.

Fortunately, her own expectations in righting these situations are self-limited:

This book has quite a modest double aim: first, to mourn, without much mature perspective or academic rigour, the apparent collapse of civility in all areas of our dealings with strangers; then to locate a tiny flame of hope in the rubble and fan it madly with a big hat.

She’s against being prescriptive or proscriptive, and has a basic position that can be summed up as “Remember you are with other people; show some consideration.” Her chief bêtes noirs are (fairly predictably) automated telephone call services, shop assistants who don’t pay attention, and most things to do with information technology (‘There’s a WEBSITE for people with INTERNET ADDICTION’ [!])

Strangely enough, she is quite tolerant of people using mobile phones in public places and saying asinine things such as “I’m on the train. We’re just leaving Euston/Manchester/Bristol”. But I was glad to see that she secretly wished physical pain (as I do) to kids who skateboard or cycle on the pavement.

She’s good at cataloguing the language of insolence and contempt in sloppy service expressions – as when the waiter plonks down your main course with “There you go” and when you say “Thank you” replies with “No problems”.

She’s at her weakest when she makes the case for respect, and takes the Armistice Day memorial service as an example which ought to tug at all of our emotional coat tails. But she has lost none of her skill for switching deftly into the persona of the person she’s writing about – conjuring up their vocabulary and tone of voice with her well-attuned ear for speech and language patterns.

Of course what constitutes good manners changes with time. Nobody but a complete oaf would spit in public these days – yet I can remember when “No spitting” was a standard injunction on all public transport, even after the war. The second world war, that is.

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Lynne Truss, Talk to the Hand, London: Profile Books, 2006, pp.240, ISBN: 1861979797

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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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