“Knitting is the saving of life; Adrian has taken it up too”: Needlework, Gender, and the Bloomsbury Group

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph McBrinn
Keyword(s):  
Bloomsbury Group

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.

Literary London

2021 ◽  
pp. 226-245
Author(s):  
Helen Southworth
Keyword(s):  
Large Network ◽  
Bloomsbury Group ◽  
The Press ◽  
Literary Subject ◽  
Group Members ◽  
Night And Day ◽  
Leonard Woolf ◽  
Hogarth Press ◽  
Jacob's Room

Focusing on the period up to 1924, this chapter explores Virginia Woolf’s engagement with London as much-loved home, as literary subject (from Night and Day to Jacob’s Room and Mrs Dalloway), and as professional milieu. It considers Woolf’s roots in Hyde Park Gate, her move from Kensington to Bloomsbury after the death of her father, Leslie Stephen, and the establishment of the Bloomsbury Group. At the same time, this chapter widens the lens to look at the larger London literary scene. This was a resource to which Woolf gained access through a large network of friends, including, but not limited to, other Bloomsbury Group members, and professional contacts acquired through her work as publisher along with Leonard Woolf at the Hogarth Press. The chapter closes with Woolf’s move back into the ‘centre of things’ in Bloomsbury in 1924 as both she and the press began to outgrow Richmond.

Materialities of Abstraction

2021 ◽  
Vol 67 (2) ◽  
pp. 191-214
Author(s):  
Brandon Truett
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Abstract Art ◽  
Artistic Practice ◽  
Material World ◽  
Bloomsbury Group ◽  
Art Object ◽  
Visual Artist ◽  
The Aesthetic

This article recovers the 1918 chapbook that the understudied Vorticist poet and visual artist Jessie Dismorr composed for the American sculptor John Storrs and his wife Marguerite. It examines the ways the chapbook reorients the aesthetic criteria by which we recognize abstraction in the early twentieth century. Studying how Dismorr’s divergent and feminist approach to Vorticist practice exploits “the materialities of abstraction,” or the traces of the material world that evince the outside of the abstract art object, it suggests that these material traces lead us to reimagine the boundary between inside and outside, and thus the way an art object indexes and interacts with the material world. Proposing that the recovery of an object as seemingly inconsequential as an individual chapbook in fact raises questions about how we construct the literary- and art-historical field of modernism, the article situates Dismorr’s work in relation to other feminist understandings in British modernism of the socialized space of artistic practice across media exemplified by Virginia Woolf ’s account of sociability within the Bloomsbury Group, and argues for the importance of such unique objects as chapbooks to the study of material culture within literary history and within art history as well.

“Vision and Design” in Virginia Woolf

PMLA ◽  
1946 ◽  
Vol 61 (3) ◽  
pp. 835-847
Author(s):  
John Hawley Roberts
Keyword(s):  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Bloomsbury Group ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Hogarth Press

The fact that Roger Fry and Virginia Woolf were friends and colleagues in the realm of art needs no demonstration. Not only were they closely associated for many years as members of “the Bloomsbury Group,” but the Hogarth Press, established by the Woolfs in Tavistock Square, published some of Fry's essays. After Fry's death in 1934, it was Virginia Woolf who, at the request of Fry's sister, became his biographer. This portrait of the critic was undertaken, says Margery Fry in the “Foreword” addressed to Mrs. Woolf, as a result of “one of those discussions upon the methods of the arts which illuminated his long and happy friendship with you.”

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.

Virginia and After

Leonard Woolf ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 50-80
Author(s):  
Fred Leventhal ◽  
Peter Stansky
Keyword(s):  
Civil Service ◽  
Publishing House ◽  
Bloomsbury Group ◽  
Literary Figure ◽  
Central Member ◽  
Hogarth Press ◽  
Falling In Love

When Leonard returned from Ceylon after seven years on home leave, his growing doubts about a career in the civil service, and his falling in love with Virginia Stephen, led him to resign. For the rest of his life he would be a central member of the Bloomsbury Group and deeply involved in its cultural and literary activities. On his marriage in 1912, he devoted himself to enabling his wife to become an extremely important writer and to being the custodian of her work after her suicide in 1941. Together they founded the small but highly successful publishing house, the Hogarth Press. Through his innumerable reviews he was a major literary figure, but he abandoned fiction after his second novel, The Wise Virgins. After Virginia’s death, his life was enriched through the companionship of Trekkie Parsons. Also in his last decade he wrote five superb short volumes of autobiography.

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.

Woolf, (Adeline) Virginia (1882–1941)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bryony Randall
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Narrative Form ◽  
Bloomsbury Group ◽  
To The Lighthouse ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Leonard Woolf ◽  
Story Writer ◽  
Literary Output

Virginia Woolf was one of the foremost literary innovators of the early twentieth century. A novelist, essayist, short-story writer and literary critic, she was also instrumental in disseminating the work of other key modernist writers, through the Hogarth Press which she ran with her husband Leonard Woolf. Author of such major works as Mrs Dalloway¸ To the Lighthouse and A Room of One’s Own, she was a key figure in the Bloomsbury Group of writers, artists and intellectuals active in the early twentieth century. Although her bouts of mental illness (culminating in her suicide by drowning in March 1941) for many years overshadowed appreciations of her literary output, she is now recognized as one of the most important figures in the literature and culture of the period, whether in terms of the feminist politics of her work, or her ground-breaking experiments with narrative form and technique.

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