Bloomsbury

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Claire Battershill
Keyword(s):  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Residential Buildings ◽  
British Museum ◽  
Modernist Literature ◽  
John Maynard Keynes ◽  
Bloomsbury Group ◽  
Lytton Strachey ◽  
Art And Culture ◽  
The University

Bloomsbury is an area of Central London located in the Borough of Camden between Euston Road and Holborn. The neighborhood is home to the British Museum and the University of London as well as a number of Georgian residential buildings arranged around manicured squares and gardens. In the context of modernist literature, art, and culture, Bloomsbury is associated with a loosely defined social circle known as "the Bloomsbury Group," "the Bloomsbury Set," or simply "Bloomsbury," a gathering of writers, artists, and intellectuals who lived and worked in the area in the early part of the twentieth century. There is some critical disagreement about exactly who belonged to the group, but some of its key figures included Leonard and Virginia Woolf, John Maynard Keynes, E. M. Forster, Roger Fry, Vanessa Bell, Lytton Strachey, and Duncan Grant. Members of the group contributed to various aspects of modernist thought and culture including feminism, analytic philosophy, psychoanalysis, macroeconomics, progressive domestic arrangements, left-oriented politics, Post-Impressionist art, and literary experimentation.

Leonard Woolf

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fred Leventhal ◽  
Peter Stansky
Keyword(s):  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Publishing House ◽  
Early Death ◽  
International Affairs ◽  
John Maynard Keynes ◽  
Bloomsbury Group ◽  
Unusual Position ◽  
Leonard Woolf ◽  
Hogarth Press ◽  
The Village

This is a wide-ranging biography of Leonard Woolf (1880–1969), an important yet somewhat neglected figure in British life. He is in the unusual position of being overshadowed by his wife, Virginia Woolf, and his role in helping her is part of this study. He was born in London to a father who was a successful barrister but whose early death left the family in economic difficulty. Though he abandoned his Judaism when young, being Jewish was deeply significant in shaping Leonard’s ideas, as well as the Hellenism imbibed as a student at both St Paul’s and Trinity College, Cambridge. Despite his secularism, there were surprisingly spiritual dimensions to his life. At Cambridge he was a member of the secret discussion group, the Apostles, as were his friends Lytton Stracheyand John Maynard Keynes, thus becoming part of the later Bloomsbury Group. He spent seven years as a successful civil servant in Ceylon, which later enabled him to write brilliantly about empire as well as a powerful novel, The Village in the Jungle. Returning to London in 1911, he married Virginia Woolf the next year. In 1917 they founded the Hogarth Press, a successful and significant publishing house. During his long life he became a major figure, a prolific writer on a range of subjects, most importantly international affairs, especially the creation of the League of Nations, a range of domestic problems, and issues of imperialism, particularly in Africa. He was a seminal figure in twentieth-century British life.

Camp Sites: Forster and the Biographies of Queer Bloomsbury

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
George Piggford
Keyword(s):  
Economic Consequences ◽  
Sexual Practices ◽  
Noticeable Effect ◽  
John Maynard Keynes ◽  
Bloomsbury Group ◽  
Psychological Realism ◽  
Queen Victoria ◽  
Lytton Strachey ◽  
Literary Practices ◽  
Old Friends

Members of the Bloomsbury Group wrote biographical texts influenced by the camp style of Lytton Strachey in Eminent Victorians and Queen Victoria. The most noticeable effect of this style is the subversion of Victorian biographical conventions. Stracheyesque qualities can be found in Virginia Woolf’s Orlando and Flush, John Maynard Keynes’ The Economic Consequences of the Peace, Clive Bell’s Old Friends, and E.M. Forster’s early nonfiction sketches and his biographies of Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson and Marianne Thornton. Especially in their biographical writings these figures felt free to emphasize exaggeration, even silliness, in contrast to the psychological realism prevalent in their own and others’ fictional literary experiments. The Stracheyesque note in Bloomsbury biography provides a common quality and arguably queers readers’ expectations of modernist literary practices. As with the pervasive irregularity of their sexual practices, such textual play might be understood as liberatory and subversive.

Cambridge

Leonard Woolf ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 15-29
Author(s):  
Fred Leventhal ◽  
Peter Stansky
Keyword(s):  
Trinity College ◽  
Discussion Group ◽  
Good Friend ◽  
John Maynard Keynes ◽  
Bloomsbury Group ◽  
King's College ◽  
Close Friendships ◽  
Lytton Strachey

Woolf went to Trinity College, Cambridge, to read Classics. There probably the more important part of his education was the close friendships he formed with Lytton Strachey and Clive Bell as well as John Maynard Keynes from King’s College, Cambridge. Leonard, Strachey, and Keynes were all members of the Apostles, a small select secret discussion group, very much under the influence of the philosopher G. E. Moore. This shaped his ideas about politics, art, and the importance of friendship. At Trinity he also became a good friend of Thoby Stephen, brother of Virginia and Vanessa Stephen. Through these friendships the Bloomsbury Group would come into existence some years later. He also began to write, but in the first instance largely poetry.

Huxley, Aldous (1894–1963)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jake Poller
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
New World ◽  
Bertrand Russell ◽  
Aldous Huxley ◽  
Bloomsbury Group ◽  
Little Magazines ◽  
Counter Culture ◽  
Lytton Strachey ◽  
Brave New World

Aldous Huxley is an English writer who is best known for his dystopian novel Brave New World (1932) and his disquisition on psychedelic substances, The Doors of Perception (1954). In the inter-war years, Huxley commanded a formidable reputation, and his work was considered alongside the leading modernists. He was impressively prolific and wrote in a variety of genres, producing poetry, short stories, essays, novels, plays, biography, and travel writing. His work appeared in many of the modernist Little Magazines, such as Coterie, The Egoist and Wheels. Huxley was a zealous individualist: while he socialized with Virginia Woolf, Roger Fry, and Clive Bell (among others), he was never part of the Bloomsbury Group; likewise, though a regular guest at Garsington Manor, the home of society hostess Lady Ottoline Morrell, he was not regarded as a member of her pacifist coterie that included Lytton Strachey and Bertrand Russell. After moving to America, Huxley became increasingly concerned with mysticism, and his reputation declined; however, the work he produced during this period was championed by key figures in the New Age and counter-culture movements, and he played a vital part in popularizing Eastern religions in the West, such as Buddhism, Tantra, and Advaita Vedanta.

Duncan Grant and Charleston’s Queer Arcadia

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Darren Clarke
Keyword(s):  
Gay Men ◽  
The Political ◽  
John Maynard Keynes ◽  
Bloomsbury Group ◽  
The First World War ◽  
Lytton Strachey ◽  
Part Time ◽  
Group Biography ◽  
Young Gay Men ◽  
First World

Charleston curator Darren Clarke provides a queer group biography in this discussion of the centrality of Charleston Farmhouse to the lives and working practice of the Bloomsbury artists Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant. First inhabited by them in 1916, at the height of the First World War, as a home for passivism and conscientious objection, Charleston was initially home for a ménage à trois consisting of Grant, Bell, and David Garnett. For over fifty years, Charleston remained a space that could accommodate queer desires alongside alternative formations of domesticity. Frequent guests and part-time residents included Lytton Strachey, E.M. Forster, John Maynard Keynes, Raymond Mortimer, Angus Davidson, Peter Morris, George Bergen, and Paul Roche. After Bell’s death in 1961, Charleston became a place of pilgrimage for young gay men energized by the political, social, and sexual freedoms of the Bloomsbury Group and encouraged by Grant’s hospitality until his death in 1978.

Strachey, (Giles) Lytton (1880–1932)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emma Butcher
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Life Writing ◽  
Bloomsbury Group ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Founding Member ◽  
Beliefs And Values ◽  
Literary Art ◽  
Lytton Strachey ◽  
Circle Of Friends

Lytton Strachey was an important twentieth-century biographer and literary critic, best known for his role as a founding member of the highly influential Bloomsbury Group. The group comprised key intellectual and creative figures whose controversial, avant-garde work contributed to the modernization of twentieth-century artistic doctrines. His best-known work, Eminent Victorians, published in 1918, helped reinvent life writing as a high literary art. His satirical representations of celebrated Victorians helped to destabilize nineteenth-century values and exposed the hypocrisy of Victorian morality. He identified as a homosexual, openly discussing his beliefs and values with his close circle of friends. This information was not made public until after his death, caused by undiagnosed stomach cancer, at the age of 51. Although overshadowed by his Bloomsbury contemporaries such as Virginia Woolf, he remains a popular and important figure.

Excavations at Ur, 1931–2

1932 ◽  
Vol 12 (4) ◽  
pp. 355-392 ◽  
Author(s):  
C. Leonard Woolley
Keyword(s):  
British Museum ◽  
University Of Pennsylvania ◽  
Single Visit ◽  
The University ◽  
The Way

The tenth season of the Joint Expedition of the British Museum and of the Museum of the University of Pennsylvania began work in the field on 25 November 1931, and closed down on 19 March 1932. In addition to my wife, my staff included Mr. J. C. Rose, who came out as architect for his second season, and Mr. R. P. Ross-Williamson, who acted as general archaeological assistant; Mr. F. L. W. Richardson of Boston, Massachusetts, was also attached to the Expedition to make a contoured survey of the site (pl. LVIII). NO epigraphist was engaged, for the work contemplated was not expected to produce much in the way of inscriptions; but an arrangement was made whereby Dr. Cyrus B.Gordon, epigraphist on the Tell Billah Expedition of the Museum of the University of Pennsylvania, could be called upon to give his services when required; actually a single visit enabled him to do all that was essential. To each of these I am very much indebted. As usual, Hamoudi was head foreman, with his sons Yahia, Ibrahim and Alawi acting under him, and as usual was invaluable; Yahia also was responsible for all the photographic work of the season. The average number of men employed was 180. This relatively small number of workmen, and the shortness of the season, were dictated partly by reasons of finance but more by the nature of our programme, which envisaged not any new departure in excavation but the clearing up of various points still in doubt and the further probing of sites already excavated, with a view to the final publication of the results of former seasons; the work was therefore rather scattered, five different areas being investigated in turn.

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