Bloomsbury Group

Bloomsbury Group is the name applied to an informal association of writers, artists, and intellectuals, many of whom lived in Bloomsbury, a residential district in central London. This group of friends began to meet around 1905 for conversations about the arts and issues in philosophy. Its members, who opposed the narrow post-Victorian restrictions in both the arts and morality, included the novelists Virginia Woolf and E. M. Forster, the painters Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell (Virginia Woolf’s sister), the influential art critics Clive Bell and Roger Frye, the iconoclastic biographer of Victorian personages Lytton Strachey, and the famed economist John Maynard Keynes. Some members were linked not only by common interests and viewpoints but also by complicated erotic liaisons, both heterosexual and homosexual. The Bloomsbury Group had an important influence on innovative literary, artistic, and intellectual developments in the two decades after the First World War, which ended in 1918. A memoir by the son of Clive Bell and Vanessa Stephen is Quentin Bell, Bloomsbury Recalled (1997). See Leon Edel, Bloomsbury: A House of Lions (1979); S. P. Rosenbaum, ed., The Bloomsbury Group: A Collection of Memoirs and Commentary (1995); and Rosenbaum, ed., A Bloomsbury Group Reader (1993).