Victorian Bloomsbury

While Bloomsbury is now associated with Virginia Woolf and her early-20th-century circle of writers and artists, the neighbourhood was originally the undisputed intellectual quarter of 19th-century London. This title presents a rich history of the great Bloomsbury pioneersthe educational, medical, and social reformists who led crusades for all.

'A subtle and powerful picture of the Bloomsbury Group...S P Rosenbaum is an unparalleled interpreter of the philosophical as well as the literary traditions absorbed by this group.' Richard Ellman 'This is more detailed, more considered, more extensive, and therefore far more valuable than anything of the kind we have had before...required reading for anyone professing a serious interest in Bloomsbury.' Andrew McNellie This first volume of a three-volume study of the early literary history of the Bloomsbury Group describes the intellectual, family and Cambridge backgrounds of Bloomsbury as they are reflected in the Group's early or autobiographical works. While many books have been written on the Bloomsbury Group this is the first to study comprehensively the literary history of their interrelated achievements. Professor Rosenbaum has written a wonderful account of the ideas and people who were the early influences on the Group. He sees the modern period not as the age of 'great men', but in a new light, where original ideas about art, women and society. This book will be of interest not only to anyone fascinated by the Bloomsbury Group, but also to students of Woolf or Forster or Keynes or Strachey who need to know the background of those writers.

Provides a comprehensive guide to the storied Bloomsbury Group, a social circle of prominent intellectuals active during the interwar period.

Georgian Bloomsbury completes the literary history of Old Bloomsbury that began with Victorian Bloomsbury (1987) and continued with Edwardian Bloomsbury (1994). Covering the years between the First Post-Impressionist Exhibition and The First World War, the book describes and analyzes interrelated literary works by Roger Fry, Desmond MacCarthy, Clive Bell, E.M. Forster, Lytton Strachey, Leonard Woolf, and Virginia Woolf. The works considered include fiction, criticism, essays, and polemics as well as autobiography, journalism and literary history that members of the Bloomsbury Group wrote between 1910 and 1914.

This study explores the role of fiction in the social production of the West Central district of London in the nineteenth century. It tells a new history of the novel from a local geographical perspective, tracing developments in the form as it engaged with Bloomsbury in the period it emerged as the city’s dominant literary zone. A neighbourhood that was subject simultaneously to socio-economic decline and cultural ascent, fiction set in Bloomsbury is shown to have reconceived the area’s marginality as potential autonomy. Drawing on sociological theory, this book critically historicizes Bloomsbury’s trajectory to show that its association with the intellectual “fraction” known as the ‘Bloomsbury Group’ at the beginning of the twentieth century was symptomatic rather than exceptional. From the 1820s onwards, writers positioned themselves socially within the metropolitan geography they projected through their fiction. As Bloomsbury became increasingly identified with the cultural capital of writers rather than the economic capital of established wealth, writers subtly affiliated themselves with the area, and the figure of the writer and Bloomsbury became symbolically conflated.

'This is the second volume of a formidable enterprise, and part of a series of publications by the same author that may entitle him to the position as the leading scholar of the Bloomsbury Group...Rosenbaum has managed to write with freshness and insight about Forster's novels, no matter how much they have been analyzed before...The next volume will deal with the effect of that exhibition upon the Group's writing and much more, I am sure, of its early literary history. The work is eagerly awaited.' - Peter Stanksy, English Literature in Transition 1880-1920 Edwardian Bloomsbury is a continuation of the early literary history of the Bloomsbury Group begun with Victorian Bloomsbury, but it can also be read independently as an account of the Group's interrelated writings during the first decade of the twentieth century.

The untold story of Shakespeare's profound influence on Virginia Woolf and the rest of the Bloomsbury Group For the men and women of the Bloomsbury Group, Shakespeare was a constant presence and a creative benchmark. Not only the works they intended for publication--the novels, biographies, economic and political writings, stage designs and reviews--but also their diaries and correspondence, their gossip and small talk turned regularly on Shakespeare. They read his plays for pleasure in the evenings, and on sunny summer afternoons in the country. They went to the theater, discussed performances, and speculated about Shakespeare's mind. As poet, as dramatist, as model and icon, as elusive "life," Shakespeare haunted their imaginations and made his way, through phrase, allusion, and oblique reference, into their own lives and art. This is a book about Shakespeare in Bloomsbury--about the role Shakespeare played in the lives of a charismatic and influential cast, including Virginia and Leonard Woolf, Vanessa Bell, Clive Bell, Roger Fry, Duncan Grant, Lytton Strachey, John Maynard Keynes and Lydia Lopokova Keynes, Desmond and Molly MacCarthy, and James and Alix Strachey. All are brought to sparkling life in Marjorie Garber's intimate account of how Shakespeare provided them with a common language, a set of reference points, and a model for what they did not hesitate to call genius. Among these brilliant friends, Garber shows, Shakespeare was in effect another, if less fully acknowledged, member of the Bloomsbury Group.