The Bloomsbury Group transformed British culture in the early 20th century – and its impact is still felt across the world today. The secret to its success, writes Frances Spalding, lay in the strong bonds between its members
A veritable industry has grown up around Bloomsbury, the group of writers, artists and intellectuals that was, in poet Stephen Spender’s opinion, “the most constructive and creative influence on English taste between the two wars”. Its history and idiosyncrasies have become the subject of countless articles, books, exhibitions, documentaries, plays, TV series, films and ballets. Its reputation has travelled far, to many places around the world.
The chief reason that the Bloomsbury Group remains such a source of fascination more than 100 years after it first emerged is the brilliance of its members. Among its leading lights was Roger Fry – whose championing of Post-Impressionist art in the years leading up to the First World War caused uproar in London – and Lytton Strachey, whose Eminent Victorians brought an irreverent humour to the art of writing biographies. The group also included John Maynard Keynes who, after witnessing the Treaty of Versailles, wrote The Economic Consequences of the Peace, in which he argued that the harsh war reparations would lead to the financial collapse of Germany. And, of course, there was Virginia Woolf – author of Mrs Dalloway (1925) and A Room of One’s Own (1929) – who, having declared her intention to “reform the novel”, went about doing exactly that.
With London as their base, the Bloomsbury Group established an intricate network of social, sexual and hereditary relationships that led the writer Dorothy Parker to remark that they “lived in squares… and loved in triangles”. From those squares, they shaped cultural tastes for decades to come.
Defying description
For a creative force whose influence was so wide-ranging, the Bloomsbury Group is difficult to pin down. Even their title seems to be the outcome of mere happenstance, for they first began holding regular meetings together in the early 1900s in an area of London, south of the three great rail terminals – Euston, St Pancras and King�
