The Big Boring Book Blog

The start of the Group

• The ten original “Bloomsberries” were (Writers) Virginia Woolf, E.M. Forster, Lytton Strachey, Leonard Woolf

• (Artists) Roger Fry, Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant, Clive Bell (Art Critic)

• John Maynard Keynes (Economist) & Desmond McCarthy (Journalist)

• The group formed in 1907, three years after Virginia Woolf’s father, Sir Leslie Stephen died. After their fathers death, Virginia and her siblings, Thoby, Vanessa, and Adrian, moved from Hyde Park Gate to a home in the Bloomsbury District. After the move, Thoby would invite College friends (Woolf, Strachey, and Bell) to their house on Thursday nights where they would discuss rather controversial topics with Virginia and Vanessa.

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Purpose and Point of View

• The Bloomsbury Group met to discuss life and society from their point of view.

• They were all raised in Victorian households, and in their adult lives they saw the Victorian values as “prudish and narrow-minded”.

• They were the only group to “support gay rights, women in the arts, pacifism, open marriages, uninhibited sexuality and other unconventional ideas.”

• Support for radical ideas such as these was completely unheard of and seen as insane in the early Twentieth Century

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