The Bloomsbury Group

Universität Potsdam
Institut für Anglistik / Amerikanistik
PS: Great Britain: history, culture, and society. An introductory course.
WS 2004/2005

The Bloomsbury Group

Tag der Abgabe: 14.02 2005

von

Martina Hoffeins

5. Semester
LA Gymnasien Französisch / Englisch

Table of Contents

1 Introduction  2

2 The Bloomsbury Group  3

3 Conclusion  6

Literature  7

Internet  7

1 Introduction

The Bloomsbury Group is a name given to a loose collection of writers, artists and intellectuals who belonged to the upper middle class. They came together during the period 1905-1906 at the home of Virginia Woolf and her sister Vanessa Bell in the Bloomsbury district of London to discuss certain topics concerning religious, artistic, social and sexual matters. This group existed until World War II.

They were a cultural circle working on different fields of art and art criticism. The Bloomsbury Group is widely remembered because of the output of its members Virginia and Leonard Woolf, Vanessa and Clive Bell, Duncan Grant, Roger Fry, Lytton Strachey and John Maynard Keyes. This work tries to answer briefly the question who actually belonged to the Bloomsberries and in how far their ideas, behaviour and work was modern.

2 The Bloomsbury Group

The name Bloomsbury comes from a borough of London, where the home of Virgina Woolf and her sister was situated. The group actually began there as a meeting of friends, most of them recent graduates from Cambridge University, like Toby Stephen, Clive Bell or Leonard Woolf. The Cambridge graduates were greatly influenced by the Principia Ethica of G. E. Moore, which states that good comes from a state of mind and that the meaning of life can be found in truth, beauty and friendship¹.

There are different opinions who belonged to the “hard core” of Bloomsbury, because they didn’t were an official organisation and therefore it is difficult to distinguish real members and visitors. Heinz Antor mentions the art critic Clive Bell and his wife, the painter Vanessa Bell. Her sister Virginia Woolf and its husband Leonard, who were both writers and publishers. Thoby and Adrian Stephen, the brothers of Virginia and Vanessa, as well as the painter Duncan Grant, the art critic and painter Roger Fry, the economist John Maynard Keynes, the historian Lytton Stratchey, the journalist Desmond McCarthy and Saxon Sydney-Turner². They were in conscious revolt against the artistic, social, and sexual restrictions of the Victorian age. Many of the men were objectors during the First World War, which influenced their standpoints. They were first of all liberals or socialists while Great Britain at that time was overwhelmingly conservative.

They all worked in different fields. For example John Maynard Keynes wrote critical economic essays like The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919) or A Tract on Monetary Reform (1923).

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1 See also TPM online and the article by Bart Schultz on G.E. Moore.
http://www.philosophers.co.uk/cafe/phil_jul2003.htm

2 Antor, Heinz: The Bloomsbury Group. Heidelberg; Winter: 1986.7.