Roger Fry Archives

Roger Fry – Twelve Original Woodcuts

October 3, 2009 by Roy Johnson

Hogarth Press first edition book jacket designs

150 copies were printed. Squarish octavo, unpaginated, title page + 12 original woodcuts, each printed on a separate sheet.

A copy of the third impression, printed in 1922 is currently described as: “Internally the pages are bright and clean, and the woodcuts are good impressions. The original wrapper has a small closed tear along the front top edge, and a bit of light soiling, otherwise in very good condition. Very scarce in any of the impressions. Price $3,000.00”

See digital slide show of this publication at Duke University Library

Hogarth Press studies

Woolf’s-head Publishing is a wonderful collection of cover designs, book jackets, and illustrations – but also a beautiful example of book production in its own right. It was produced as an exhibition catalogue and has quite rightly gone on to enjoy an independent life of its own. This book is a genuine collector’s item, and only months after its first publication it started to win awards for its design and production values. Anyone with the slightest interest in book production, graphic design, typography, or Bloomsbury will want to own a copy the minute they clap eyes on it.

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Leonard and Virginia Woolf as Publishers: Hogarth Press, 1917-41 John Willis brings the remarkable story of Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s success as publishers to life. He generates interesting thumbnail sketches of all the Hogarth Press authors, which brings both them and the books they wrote into sharp focus. He also follows the development of many of its best-selling titles, and there’s a full account of the social and cultural development of the press. This is a scholarly work with extensive footnotes, bibliographies, and suggestions for further reading – but most of all it is a very readable study in cultural history.

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Roger Fry a biography

July 25, 2009 by Roy Johnson

portrait of Bloomsbury’s art theorist by premier writer

This is one of the last books Virginia Woolf wrote, and it is a tribute from one artist to another, an account of Fry’s aesthetics, and one of her many excursions into biography. Actually, Roger Fry A Biography is almost a joint production, because much of the text is direct quotations from Fry’s own journals and his letters to friends. It starts with his family background of radical Quakers, a quite strict upbringing, and his interest in science and the natural world.

He was a studious youth who blossomed when he went to Cambridge and was elected to the semi-secret society of Apostles who were what would be called free-thinkers (and coincidentally formed the basis of what would later be the Bloomsbury Group). He was older than the other members of this group, and always held in high regard by them. Despite getting a first in science, he switched to the study of Art and travelled to Italy and France on a sort of autodidactic Grand Tour to bring himself into contact with the masters.

Apart from her obvious sympathy with his artistic ideas, Woolf’s approach is largely descriptive. There is little attempt at analysis of her material. And we have to put up with her reticence on personal matters to a a degree which is almost infuriating. As a young man Fry forms a relationship with a woman old enough to be his mother, who teaches him ‘the art of love’, and they remain friends to the end of life. Yet this relationship is covered in less than a paragraph, and the woman isn’t even named.

Ever after Cambridge, his problem was how to earn a living from art, and even when he got married to fellow art-lover Helen Coombe, he was still living off an income from his father. But he found work as a lecturer, wrote art criticism, got nowhere as a painter, and was eventually employed by Pierpont Morgan to buy pictures for the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Woolf makes a great deal of his organising the 1910 Post-Impressionist exhibition which caused such a rumpus (and which she claimed changed human nature). She sees this as a turning point in Fry’s life, and yet the strange thing is that at the very point that he joins the Bloomsbury Group (and where she has first-hand knowledge of his relationships with its members) she remains annoyingly coy about his personal life.

You would not know from her account that he had an affair with her sister Vanessa Bell. His life as a human being is replaced by the artistic debates which raged about Post-Impressionism, Fry’s own artistic theories, and the foundation of the Omega workshops.

Lots of well-known figures flit across the pages – George Bernard Shaw, Elgar, Lytton Strachey, André Gide – but we are as remote from his personal life as ever. Even his late life affair with Helen Anrep is mentioned almost parenthetically – though he was to live with her for the rest of his life (whilst his wife died slowly from a brain disease in a Retreat at York).

You can see why Woolf found his critical theory interesting. He was searching for a synthesis which would embrace visual art and literature, and he was modest enough to admit that his aesthetic opinions were subjective and limited:

But agreeing that aesthetic apprehension is a pre-eminently spiritual function does not imply for me any connection with morals. In the first place the contemplation of Truth is` likewise a spiritual function but is I judge entirely a-moral. Indeed I should be inclined to deny to morals (proper) any spiritual quality—they are rather the mechanism of civil life—the rules by which life in groups can be rendered tolerable and are therefore only concerned directly with behaviours.

She writes very appreciatively of his book on Cezanne, his life in London and St Remy de Provence, and his search for an all-embracing critical theory. All his life he had sought official recognition but it was denied him time and time again. Finally, in 1933 he was appointed Slade Professor of Art at Cambridge, but a year later he died.

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Virginia Woolf, Roger Fry: A Biography, London: Vintage, 2003, pp.314 ISBN: 0099442523

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Roger Fry biography

September 21, 2009 by Roy Johnson

artist, critic, designer

Roger Fry was an influential art historian and a key figure in the Bloomsbury Group. He was born in 1866 in Highgate, London, into a wealthy Quaker family. He studied at King’s College, Cambridge, where he took a first in the Natural Science ‘tripos’. Much to his family’s regret, he decided after university to pursue an artistic career rather than continue his scientific studies. In 1891 Fry went to Italy and then Paris, to study painting. He began to lecture on art, and became a critic and author. He made his debut in art criticism in 1893 with a review of George Moore’s book Modern Art for the Cambridge Review. Then in 1894 he began lecturing on Italian art for the Cambridge Extension Movement (classes for working people).

He married the artist Helen Coombe in 1896, but although his career as an artist and critic was a success, his personal life was troubled. His wife suffered from mental illness and had to be committed to an institution, where she stayed until her death in 1937. Fry was left to look after their children Pamela and Julian.

His first book on Giovanni Bellini, was published in 1899. He regularly contributed articles and criticism to the magazines Monthly Review and The Athenaeum, and in 1903 he was involved in the founding of Burlington Magazine, acting as joint editor between 1909-18, and making it into one of the most important art magazines in Britain. From 1905 to 1910, he was the Curator of Paintings for the Metropolitan Museum in New York.

He first met the artists Clive Bell and Vanessa Bell in 1910, when they invited him to lecture at Vanessa’s Friday Club. This was the artistic equivalent of her brother Thoby’s literary soirees held on Thursday evenings. He subsequently became a regular member of the Bloomsbury Group, and Virginia Woolf later wrote his biography. His affair with her sister Vanessa Bell began in 1911 when he accompanied the Bells on a holiday to Turkey. It ended when she transferred her affections to Duncan Grant in 1913.

In 1910, Fry organized the first Post-Impressionist exhibition (and indeed, coined the phrase) for the Grafton Galleries in London, and later published books on Cézanne (1927), and Matisse (1930). In 1913, he organized the Omega Workshops, a collective that encouraged the involvement of young artists in the design and decoration of everyday functional objects. This remained active until 1919.

Fry re-edited and updated a collection of his best articles and writings to produce his best known book, Vision and Design which was published in 1920. As well as Western art, the book examined the use of form and aesthetics in ethnic art from Africa, America and Asia. It was a great success, reinforcing his position as England’s leading critic and it is still recognised as an extremely influential work in the development of modernist theory.

In his ideas, Fry emphasised the importance of ‘form’ over ‘content’: that is, how a work looks, rather than what it is about. He thought that artists should use colour and arrangement of forms rather than the subject to express their ideas and feelings, and that works of art should not be judged by how accurately they represent reality.

In his personal life, it was not until 1924 after several short lived relationships (including affairs with Nina Hamnett, one of the Omega artists; and Josette Coatmellec, which ended tragically with her suicide), that he found happiness with Helen Anrep. Twenty years his junior, she left her husband and became a great support to Fry in his career, and lived with him until his death.

In 1933 Fry was offered the post of Slade Professor at Cambridge and began a series of lectures on the nature of art history that he was never to complete. The text for the lectures was published after his death in 1939 as Last Lectures. Fry died on 9 September 1934 following a fall at his London home. His ashes were placed in the vault of Kings College Chapel, Cambridge, in a casket decorated by Vanessa Bell.

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

The Bloomsbury Group: who were they?

August 5, 2009 by Roy Johnson

modernist culture and arts 1900-1950

The Bloomsbury Group is a name given to a loose collection of writers, artists, and intellectuals who came together during the period 1905-06 at the home of Virginia Woolf and her sister Vanessa Bell. Following the death of their father, Sir Leslie Stephen, they set up home in Gordon Square, Bloomsbury, in central London, close to the British Museum.

The group included Virginia Woolf (writer) and her husband-to-be Leonard Woolf (writer and later political figure); her sister Vanessa Bell (artist) and her husband Clive Bell; the artist and critic Roger Fry; the novelist E.M.Forster and poet T.S.Eliot; economist John Maynard Keynes and philosopher Bertrand Russell; the writers Gerald Brenan, Lytton Strachey, and Vita Sackville-West; artists Duncan Grant and Dora Carrington.

The Bloomsbury Group is a short but charming book which explores the impact of Bloomsbury personalities on each other, plus how they shaped the development of British modernism. It’s actually the illustrated catalogue of an exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery. 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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Toby invited his friends to soirees, and Vanessa invited hers. The two groups met, networked, formed liaisons with each other (that’s putting it mildly) and created some of the central works of the modernist movement in Britain in the period 1905-1930.

They were in conscious revolt against the artistic, social, and sexual restrictions of the Victorian age. They were on the whole from an upper middle class intellectual elite, but it has to be said that in their personal lives they defied the status quo, and most of them were very productive.

In fact, the true centre of the group was Cambridge University, where their brother Toby had met a number of intellectuals who had come under the influence of G.M. Moore, whose Principia Ethica (1903) had made a serious impression on undergraduates who formed a group called the ‘Apostles’. He propounded a notion of ethics which rested on the pursuit of friendship, happiness, and the cultivation of the intellect.

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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Influenced by this notion of free-spirited friendship, intellectual liberty, and radical life-styles, many of the men were conscientious objectors during the First World War. They were liberals or socialists at a time when the English establishment was overwhelmingly conservative; and in their personal relationships they pushed back the boundaries of what could be done in a way which was not seen again until the 1960s.

Many of these people became sexually involved with each other in a way which even now seems quite bewildering. Married to one person, but in cahoots with someone else, often of the same sex. Some of them even lived with a person of the opposite sex yet shared the same lover.

It has to be remembered that at that time homosexuality was a criminal offence (though only for men) and many gay men got married as a legal cover and a smokescreen to provide social legitimacy.

There were also lots of minor figures who are counted amongst the Bloomsbury Group – people such as Harold Nicolson (diplomat and writer); Mark Gertler (painter); Desmond MacCarthy (literary critic); Saxon Sydney-Turner (civil servant); David Garnett and John Lehmann (writers); and Ottoline Morrell (social hostess).

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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The intellectual connections between these people were amazing. For instance, the Woolfs established the Hogarth Press in their own home as a hobby-cum-therapy to help Virginia through her periods of depression and madness. The Press published not only her own works, but books by T.S.Eliot, Vita Sackville-West, and Christopher Isherwood. They even pioneered the work of Sigmund Freud, whose writing was translated by James Strachey, Lytton Strachey’s brother.

It also has to be said that many of the group were enormously productive and high-achievers. Despite her periods of mental illness, Virginia Woolf was a voluminous diarist and letter writer – as was her husband Leonard Woolf. Together they also ran the Hogarth Press. Economist John Maynard Keynes produced an almost unbroken stream of influential political studies and policy documents whilst working in a number of high-ranking government positions. And Vita Sackville-West was a best-selling novelist and award-winning poet who also wrote books on historic houses and gardens.

A Bloomsbury Canvas is a selection of essays on the Bloomsbury Group. Essayists include Hermione Lee, biographer of Virginia Woolf; art historians Richard Shone and Frances Spalding; Nigel Nicolson, author of Portrait of a Marriage, a study of his parents, Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson; and the last survivors of those closely connected to the Bloomsbury Group – Frances Partridge, Quentin Bell and Angelica Garnett. The text is illustrated with many previously unpublished works.
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The Omega Workshops

September 17, 2009 by Roy Johnson

Bloomsbury graphic and interior design

The Omega Workshops was a short-lived but influential artists’ co-operative which formed as an offshoot of the Bloomsbury Group. It was the brainchild of Roger Fry who had the philanthropic notion of a self-help scheme for hard-up artists who would create goods of simple but Post-Impressionist modern design. It was partly a reaction against the drabness of mass-produced household goods, but it did not have any of the socialist ideology of William Morris’s earlier Arts and Crafts movement.

It opened in 1913 at the worst possible time in commercial terms, at 33 Fitzroy Square in the heart of Bloomsbury. Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant, and Roger Fry were named as directors, and the premises included both public showrooms as well as artists’ studios. Although the works were produced by people we now see as influential members of the modernist movement, individual productions were made anonymously, signed only with the letter Omega. Artists worked three and a half days a week, for which they were paid thirty shillings. The opening was regarded as nothing short of scandalous. This was a time when popular opinion, fanned by a largely reactionary press, was sceptical to the point of hostility on matters of modern art – especially when it was coupled to something as daring as interior design.

A number of famous names were associated with the workshop: at one time or another Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, Paul Nash, David Bomberg, William Roberts, and Mark Gertler all had connections with the Omega.

At the launch of the project, artist and writer Wyndham Lewis was also a member; but he quickly split away from the group in a dispute over Omega’s contribution to the Ideal Homes Exhibition. Lewis circulated a letter to all shareholders, making accusations against the company and Roger Fry in particular, and pouring scorn on the products of Omega and its ideology. This subsequently led to his establishing the rival Vorticist movement and the publication in 1916 of its two-issue house magazine, BLAST.

In 1915 Omega started to introduce clothing into the repertoire, inspired by both the costumes of the Ballets Russes and Duncan Grant’s theatre designs. Avid supporters included the flamboyant dresser and socialite Ottoline Morrell as well as the famous bohemian artist (and alcoholic) Nina Hamnet who helped by modelling the clothes.

The war years were difficult for Omega, because many of the principal figures were out of London, working on various agricultural projects as conscientious objectors. Whilst Roger Fry continued to support Omega in London, Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant moved to Charleston in Sussex, where they put their efforts into decorating the entire house in Omega style – an effort which is now maintained by the National Trust.

Bloomsbury prevailed on all its high society contacts to patronise the workshop, and some commissions for interior house designs were forthcoming from people such as Mary Hutchinson – who was Clive Bell’s mistress. But the reputation of the workshops was not helped by the fact that many of its products were poorly constructed. The biggest commercial success of the Omega was its final closing down sale in 1919, when everything went for half price.

It was a venture which was launched with disastrous timing and foundered on a combination of amateurism and poor management. Yet it established interior design as a legitimate artistic activity, and its influence continued from the 1920s onwards. As Virginia Nicholson in her study Among the Bohemians observes:

Many of the late twentieth-century and contemporary trends are in themselves tributes to the influence of the Charleston artists, to the Diaghilev ballet designers, to the aesthetes, to Omega, and to the members of the Arts and Crafts movement. The modern fashionable interior pays homage to a creative urge amongst a relatively small sub-section of society in the early decades of the twentieth century. So much of what those artists did has been assimilated and re-assimilated, that one should not be surprised that their tastes are yet again being re-cycled for the World of Interiors readership, even if their origins are not always acknowledged.

Omega cabinet – designed by Roger Fry

Omega and After is a beautifully illustrated account of the workshops and their aftermath. It focuses on the three principals – Roger Fry, Vanessa Bell, and Duncan Grant, tracing their artistic production (and their tangled personal relationships) from 1913 to the interwar years. Even when the workshops closed, Grant and Bell continued their interior design work in their decorated house at Charleston. The Omega Workshops had a lasting influence on interior design in the post-war years. This is a rich collection of quite rare pictures, portraits and sketches.
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Virginia Woolf – Roger Fry

October 4, 2009 by Roy Johnson

Hogarth Press first edition book jacket designs

Virginia Woolf, Roger Fry (1940). Cover design and portrait of Roger Fry by Vanessa Bell

“Virginia’s biography of Roger Fry, a study of the painter and art critic, had been urged on her by Fry’s widow, Margery, and by Vanessa Bell after his death in 1934. It was her next book after Three Guineas (1938) and the last book she published with the press whilst she was still alive. Leonard thought she should not have undertaken it, and when it was completed, he thought it one of her four books written against the grain. Virginia often found the research and writing both restrictive and burdensome, curtailed as she was by propriety from treating openly Fry’s personal and sexual life (his passionate affair with Vanessa, for example); yet much of the work was intellectually and artistically challenging as she strove to create a critical biography of a man she had known and deeply admired since 1911.”

J.H. Willis Jr, Leonard and Virginia Woolf as Publishers: The Hogarth Press 1917-1941

Hogarth Press studies

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Virginia Woolf non-fiction

September 24, 2009 by Roy Johnson

essays, letters, diaries, lectures, biography

The Essays are a wonderful introduction to the world of belles lettres. Virginia Woolf’s non-fiction writing and literary career began in her father’s library. She read the classics whilst young, then began to write about her literary experiences, producing reviews for the Manchester Guardian and the Times Literary Supplement – whose contributions were anonymous in those days. Her tastes are humane and well informed. Read her articles on Shakespeare, Charlotte Bronte, and Katherine Mansfield – and you will feel like reading the texts again immediately. She is astonishingly wide-ranging – from the Greek classics via Renaissance drama and Enlightenment journalism, to contemporary fiction. The approach is rather biographical and author-centred, but these are intelligent and gracefully composed essays which speak eloquently on literary and cultural life.

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The Letters are for specialists and the ultimate gossip trivia for Woolf fans. There really is everything from laundry bills, to dinner party recipes, and snobbish lists of people who are ‘in’ or ‘out’. Many of them read as if they were written for public consumption, and even in the gossip there is a lot of repetition. It’s interesting to note just how much of this listing and gossip-mongering is recycled in one letter after another. But this is not surprising, given the communication technology available at the time. The telephone had only just been introduced, and there were two or even three postal deliveries a day at that period. However, if they are read in conjunction with her biography, it is possible to trace the ebb and flow of her personal relationships at very close quarters. For a richer insight into the workings of her keen intellect and creative spirit, the diaries offer greater rewards.

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The Diaries are quite simply a marvellous human document. Don’t expect lots of intimate personal revelations of the kind we’re used to almost a hundred years later, but there’s a vivacity about her personal reflections which make them a wonderful reading experience. More importantly, it is here that she reveals the secrets of the creative process. She feels the beginnings of important ideas coming on like a mood or an illness. The topic swells, grows in her imagination, and sometimes takes her over like an intellectual love affair. She suffers; she struggles to express elusive ideas; she writes; and then finally the work emerges and she is exhausted with the effort. This is the nearest to the deeply creative process you are likely to come across. Of course there are lots of observations on contemporary affairs which make this an interesting historical document too. One minute it’s creative breakthroughs via metaphors or new techniques, then next it’s the Versailles Treaty and her husband Leonard’s part in it. But the real benefit (almost a privilege) is to be invited to share the private thoughts of a first class creative mind.

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A Writer’s Journal It’s no wonder that the best parts of her diaries were extracted and published separately by her husband Leonard Woolf. If you don’t have time to read the full personal chronicles, this is a very good condensation. It’s a much-quoted source in writing manuals and books on creativity. Read it alongside her fiction, and learn how the imaginative mind works. She records the first flashes of inspiration, the development of good ideas, and the links between disparate insights. You might also be surprised to learn how much self-doubt, intellectual anguish, and hard work went into her creative life.

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A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas are like the Old and New Testament of the feminist’s Bible. The first is a series of lectures she was invited to give on ‘Women and Literature’. It is here that she coins the idea of ‘Shakespeare’s sister’ and considers the problems she would have faced if she had decided to become a writer. It’s a sparkling, critical, and wide-ranging expose of male privilege and the way in which women have been excluded from cultural life. If you want to start with feminist theory – particularly in its relationship to literature – this is where to begin. Ten years later she extended the feminist critique of patriarchy and privilege to a much greater extent. All parts of the English establishment are subject to an excoriating analysis which leaves them exposed as instruments of ideological dominance and cultural power. In Three Guineas she offers a scathing analysis of the pillars of English society – the Crown, the Church, the Judiciary, the Military, and the Universities. It’s a pity this is not as well known or as well read as A Room of One’s Own – because it is more searching, more incisive, more critical, and much more radical.

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On Being Ill Virginia Woolf knew a lot about illness. She suffered from repeated bouts of both physical and mental debility throughout her life. But how inventive of her to actually write about it. This is one of her lesser-known but amazingly thoughtful pieces of essay writing. It’s a philosophic meditation on the experience of illness, including even its pleasures and advantages. She also includes reflections on reading and the benefits of enforced idleness. She discusses the cultural taboos associated with illness and explores how, even though it is a more-or-less universal experience, it has been excluded from a great deal of literature. This edition has an introduction by Hermione Lee, one of her best biographers.

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Roger Fry Her biography is both a homage to a family friend and a debate with a fellow artist – particularly on the relationship between aesthetics and realism. It was an official work commissioned by the Fry family- so don’t expect any revelations, or even any mention that Fry was once her sister’s lover. She emphasises his Quaker background, his scientific training, his amazing energy in organising art events (such as the Omega workshop) and his loyalty. Much of the work is based on letters and diaries, and of course the two artists were close friends – so at least it’s authentic.

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

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Virginia Woolf – web links
Virginia Woolf – greatest works
Virginia Woolf – criticism
Virginia Woolf – life and works

Hogarth Press first edition book jacket designs

Hogarth Press studies

portrait of Bloomsbury’s art theorist by premier writer

artist, critic, designer

Bloomsbury Group – web links

modernist culture and arts 1900-1950

Bloomsbury graphic and interior design

Hogarth Press first edition book jacket designs

Hogarth Press studies

essays, letters, diaries, lectures, biography

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