Bloomsbury and Its Make-Up :: Bloomsbury History Literature Essays

Bloomsbury and Its Make-Up Literature and Art were very important in the early 1900’s. Someone could always turn to a book or a painting to help them be more relaxed and feel more comfortable. One of the major groups of the early 1900’s that had both aspects of literature and art was the Bloomsbury group. This group was made up of a number of people, who shared similar interests and views. One of the more notable writers in the 1900’s, Virginia Woolf was a member of the Bloomsberries. Many of her novels have been heavily criticized and talked about throughout the years. Virginia Woolf as well as other members of the Bloomsbury group led very radical lives which led to radical art. The history of the Bloomsbury Group, with a special emphasis on its association in art and literature, has been well told(Dowling 11). "The Bloomsbury Group, an informal coterie of writers, artists and critics who settled early this century in the district of that name in London, has long been in danger of suffocating beneath a slagheap of nostalgia"(Economist 102). They made Bloomsbury Square in London the center if activities from 1904 to W.W.II. This group included, Lytton Strachey, Virginia Woolf, Leonard Woolf, E.M. Forster, V. Sackville-West, Roger Fry, Clive Bell, John Maynard Keynes and Vanessa Bell. Four of the members had gone to Cambridge in 1899 and they were immediately taken by the intellectual air of the University as opposed to the sterility and boredom of other schools they had attended. Every Bloomsbury who attended Cambridge thrived there. "Body and spirit, reason and emotion, work and play, architecture and scenery, laughter and seriousness, life and art, these pairs which elsewhere contrasted were there fused into one" (http://www.feminista.com). Bloomsbury was always under fire. This is the common fate of all groups, coteries and cliques, particularly if they have sufficient liveliness to make a new contribution to the thought of their time. Bloomsbury certainly has not been left out from the variations of aesthetic feeling and today its situation is similar to the Pre-Raphaelites forty years ago. "Bloomsbury however was unlike the Pre-Raphaelites in that it had been criticized from a bewilderingly large number of points of view" (Bell 10). The Bloomsbury Group has been praised as a hothouse for writing talent. The founders main concern was to maintain that "magic quality" they had discovered at Cambridge. There was no formal membership list or leader or set of rules to follow.