Bloomsbury Group

The Bloomsbury Group was an informal salon for British intellectuals of diverse disciplines who shared common philosophical and political viewpoints and collaborated on creative and critical projects. It also doubled as a countercultural social circle within the late-Edwardian, World War I, and interwar years. The Bloomsbury Group is of particular interest to students of gender and sexuality because (a) its members wrote literary and nonfiction works that pose diverse [Page 77]challenges to gender-related hierarchies and other normative standards and (b) the group constituted a social support system for unconventional sexualities and polyamorous (open) relationships. The achievements of Bloomsbury members extend into fields such as literature, biography, art, philosophy, and economics and include the work of luminary figures such as writers Virginia Woolf and E. M. Forster, biographer Lytton Strachey, and artist Duncan Grant.

The Bloomsbury Group originated in the association of several of its male members through an unsanctioned intellectual society at the University of Cambridge, though it quickly expanded to include female relatives of some of the male members, including sisters Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell. During the peak years of the group's activity, most members lived and worked in London's Bloomsbury District, the group's namesake. The members shared a modernist sensibility that questioned traditional British cultural mores and idealisti-cally elevated both humanistic and instrumentalist understandings of life, death, time, and reality.

Much Bloomsbury work attacks gender role ideology and social systems such as capitalism, imperialism, and militarism. The work of people loosely associated with the group, such as John Maynard Keynes and G. E. Moore, radically transformed theory in fields such as economics and philosophy and greatly influenced the group's core members. Strachey is renowned for innovating in the writing of biography by incorporating a psychological, inward-looking approach (following the contemporaneous work of Freud, whose earliest publications in English translation came from the Bloomsbury-run Hogarth Press). Grant's postim-pressionist, figurative art addressed themes of social relevance, including homosexual desire; likewise, Forster is remembered most for Maurice (1971), a gay coming-of-age novel written around 1914 but published only posthumously.

Virginia Woolf was perhaps the most influential Bloomsbury member. Her works, including nonfiction, such as A Room of One's Own (1929) and Three Guineas (1938), and novels, such as Mrs. Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), and Orlando: A Biography (1928), directly challenge gender inequality and other social problems. Orlando is widely read as a fictionalization of Vita Sackville-West (one of Woolf's romantic partners) and traces the “biography” of a protagonist who lives across multiple centuries and undergoes a sort of mystical sex change at midlife. In many ways, the novel captures the radical spirit of the Bloomsbury Group, reaching its hopeful climax in an early 20th century free of the pretenses and many of the social and intellectual problems of earlier ages.