.008 The OG Literary It Girls
Hedonistic, Louche, Bohemian: The Entangled Brilliance of the Bloomsbury Group
An economist, a painter, and a novelist walk into a bar… rather than the start of a bad joke, this could very well be a description of any given Saturday night in the West London neighborhood of Bloomsbury in 1912.
Before Brat, there was Bloomsbury — a collection of twenty-odd artists, writers, and minor aristocrats who formed the core of a hedonistic and experimental sub-culture in the midst of Edwardian London.
At the center of this milieu were the Stephen siblings — Vanessa, Thoby, Virginia, and Adrian. In May 1903, Vanessa and Virginia were taken by their aunt Kate to visit their brother Thoby at Cambridge. There, they met Thoby’s friends Lytton Strachey, Clive Bell, and Leonard Woolf. The charm of the Stephen siblings is well documented in diaries and letters of their contemporaries, and of course, in the marriages of Vanessa to Clive Bell in 1907 and Virginia to Leonard Woolf in 1912.
Writing to Lytton Strachey from Ceylon (Sri Lanka), Leonard Woolf conflated his future wife with Vanessa and Thoby, upon hearing that Clive Bell had expressed interest in Vanessa, or perhaps Virginia:
“You think that Bell is really wildly in love with her? The curious part is that I was too after they came up that May term to Cambridge, & still more curious that there is a mirage of it still left. She is so superbly like the Goth [the Cambridge circle’s nickname for Thoby]. I used to wonder whether he was in love with the Goth because he was in love with her & I was in love with her, because with the Goth.”
When Thoby Stephen’s Cambridge set came down to London on breaks, Vanessa and Virginia entertained them in the house in Bloomsbury that they had moved to with Adrian after their father’s death. Thus, was the board laid for the enduring influence of the OG literary scene, the Bloomsbury Group.
The Bloomsbury Group began in earnest in 1905 with ‘Thursday Evenings’ hosted by Thoby and the ‘Friday Club’ by Vanessa. Thursday Evenings were for the writers; the Friday Club was for the artists. They were informal, private salons for Thoby’s circle of Cambridge friends and Vanessa’s art school peers that soon expanded as other participants (rarely did those in the Bloomsbury Set think of themselves as ‘members’ of a formal club) invited their contemporaries.
The privacy of the Stephen house in Bloomsbury was paramount to the success of the gatherings, as Vanessa explained in a letter to Clive Bell in 1905:
The chief one seems to me to be that, as you say, we should have to eradicate politeness. We can get to the point of calling each other prigs and adulterers quite happily when the company is small & select, but its rather a question whether we could do it with a larger number of people who might not feel that they were quite on neutral ground…
In 1906, Thoby Stephen was traveling in Greece, where he contracted Typhoid Fever and died in hospital shortly after returning to England. Through the grief, the Bloomsbury Group became even closer.
While the Stephen siblings sit at the center of the group, the entangled web of Bloomsbury tendrils out and back upon itself many times. Here is the best visual I’ve found depicting the many overlapping relationships and affairs of this scene.
In 1910, the art critic Roger Fry organized an exhibition for the artists in the Bloomsbury Group and the term was used to describe the group publically for the first time. Fry continued to exhibit Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant, Dora Carrington, and the other artists through the following decade.
Leonard and Virginia Woolf, who were married in 1912, founded Hogarth Press in 1917. By establishing their own press, they were able to publish all manner of literature and philosophy, including essays by Gertrude Stein and Sigmund Freud, as well as experimental, modernist fiction. Jacob’s Room was the first of Virginia Woolf’s novels to be published by Hogarth, in 1922.
Besides producing published works and exhibitions of visual art, many members of the Bloomsbury Group were avid diarists and letter writers. It is from this wellspring of unedited, unredacted primary sources that we know so much about the intricacies of the relationships that formed the milieu from which they worked.
Virginia Woolf is undoubtedly the most enduringly famous member of the group, but the influence of the social and creative scene in which she was a part cannot be understated. The group developed its own philosophies on religion, marriage, pacifism, and aesthetics that influenced the output of all of its members. But even more than shared sensibilities, politics, and beliefs, the Bloomsbury Group inspired each other through their relationships. It is the connective tissues between the members of the set that form the basis for its lasting legacy.
A Bloomsbury Reading List
I put together a Bloomsbury reading list. You can shop the list here:
Works published by members of the Bloomsbury Group
Orlando, Virginia Woolf (A love letter to Vita Sackville West, Orlando was described by Sackville-West's son Nigel Nicolson as “the longest and most charming love-letter in literature.”)
A Room of One’s One, Virginia Woolf (Derived from two lectures delivered to women's colleges at Cambridge, A Room of One's Own outlines the cornerstone of Woolf's thought on the position of women in Edwardian society — namely vis-à-vis marriage, access to education, and income — all themes that pervade her fiction as well.)
All Passion Spent, Vita Sackville West (a fictional response to A Room of One’s Own)
The Edwardians, Vita Sackville West (a satirical paean to Edwardian society, which the Bloomsbury group was very much present in)
Eminent Victorians, Lytton Strachey (a biography of four Victorian historical figures, written with sharp-tongued wit)
Broderie Anglaise, Violet Trefusis (née Keppel, incidentally the great-aunt of Queen Camilla, Violet Trefusis’ novella fictionalizes a meeting between herself and Virginia Woolf, the former and current lovers of Vita Sackville-West, respectively)
Diaries and letters published posthumously & Scholarly Works
The Bloomsbury Group, Frances Spalding
Letters of Leonard Woolf, ed. Frederic Spotts
Love Letters: Vita and Virginia, Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West
Portrait of A Marriage, Nigel Nicholson (Written by the son of Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicholson)
Refiguring Modernism: Women of 1928, Bonnie Kime Scott
Duncan Grant: A Biography, Frances Spalding
Additionally, the website for Charleston, the Sussex home that Vanessa Bell, her lover Duncan Grant, and his lover David Garnett (it’s giving that Parks & Rec clip) bought in 1916, and which became the primary venue for the Bloomsbury set outside of London, has many excellent images and more detail on the background of the many colorful characters of Bloomsbury.
August 12–August 25
Tuesday, August 13: New York launch of Pixel Flesh by Ellen Atlanta, in conversation with Arabelle Sicardi. | 6 pm at GBY Beauty (526 W. 26th St. #517, NY). Free.
Wednesday, August 14: Launch of The Lookback Window by Kyle Dillon Hertz. Readings b2b with Kyle, Aria Aber, Adam Dalva, and Megan Nolan. | 7 pm at Powerhouse Arena (28 Adams St. Bkln). Free.
Thursday, August 15: Grace McGrade and Sean Monohan’s Irish Sleaze BDay. | 10 pm at Tenants of the Trees (LA). RSVP.
Friday, August 16: New York launch of Comorbidity, or the Reckoning by Giulia Bencivenga, with additional readings by Sasha Fletcher and Jamie Hood. | 7 pm at Unnameable Books (615 Vanderbilt Ave. Bkln). Free.
Friday, August 23: Limousine reading feat. Heather Akumiah, Haley Jakobson, Ebony Ladelle, and Isabel Banta. Hosted by Heather Akumiah and Leah Abrams. | 7 pm at Berry Park (4 Berry St. Bkln). Free.
Vanessa, Virginia, and Vita really were Those Girls