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50-588: The character names were punning parodies of prominent members of the Bloomsbury Group and other characters of the day: Each episode covered the various personal shenanigans and literary endeavours of the group, influenced by contemporary mores and events. The theme for all episodes was " You're Driving Me Crazy ", written in 1930, which could be considered rather late in the history of the Bloomsbury Group, and performed by The Temperance Seven . The series

100-751: A cadet in the Ceylon Civil Service , in Jaffna and later Kandy , and by August 1908 was named an assistant government agent in the Southern Province , where he administered the District of Hambantota . Woolf returned to England in May 1911 for a year's leave. Instead, however, he resigned in early 1912 and that same year married Virginia Stephen . Leonard and Virginia Woolf lived at 17 The Green, Richmond upon Thames , starting from October 1914. In early March 1915,

150-487: A concept of complex states of mind whose worth as a whole was not proportionate to the sum of its parts. For both Moore and Bloomsbury, the greatest ethic goods were "the importance of personal relationships and the private life", as well as aesthetic appreciation: "art for art's sake". Bloomsbury reacted against current upper class English social rituals, "the bourgeois habits ... the conventions of Victorian life" with their emphasis on public achievement, in favour of

200-454: A formal group, it was a loose collective of friends and relatives closely associated with the University of Cambridge for the men and King's College London for the women, who at one point lived, worked or studied together near Bloomsbury , London. According to Ian Ousby , "although its members denied being a group in any formal sense, they were united by an abiding belief in the importance of

250-422: A more informal and private focus on personal relationships and individual pleasure. E. M. Forster for example approved of "the decay of smartness and fashion as factors, and the growth of the idea of enjoyment", and asserted that "if I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country". The Group "believed in pleasure ... They tried to get

300-683: A number of ways the blooming of Bloomsbury. Virginia Woolf was writing and publishing her most widely read modernist novels and essays , and E. M. Forster completed A Passage to India , a highly regarded novel on British imperialism in India . Forster wrote no more novels but he became one of England's most influential essayists. Duncan Grant, and then Vanessa Bell, had single-artist exhibitions. Lytton Strachey wrote his biographies of two queens, Queen Victoria (1921) and Elizabeth and Essex: A Tragic History (1928). Desmond MacCarthy and Leonard Woolf engaged in friendly rivalry as literary editors, respectively of

350-453: The New Statesman and The Nation and Athenaeum , thus fuelling animosities that saw Bloomsbury dominating the cultural scene. Roger Fry wrote and lectured widely on art; meanwhile, Clive Bell applied Bloomsbury values to his book Civilization (1928), which Leonard Woolf saw as limited and elitist, describing Bell as a "wonderful organiser of intellectual greyhound racing tracks". In

400-557: The Bloomsbury Group , which also included various other former Apostles. In December 1917, Woolf became one of the co-founders of the 1917 Club , which met in Gerrard Street , Soho . After marriage, Woolf turned to writing and published his first novel, The Village in the Jungle (1913), which is based on his years in Ceylon. A series of books followed at roughly bi-annual intervals. On

450-556: The Ceylon Civil Service to marry Virginia in 1912. Cambridge Apostle friendships brought into the group Desmond MacCarthy, his wife Molly, and E. M. Forster. The group met not only in their homes in Bloomsbury, central London , but also at countryside retreats. There are two significant ones near Lewes in Sussex: Charleston Farmhouse , where Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant moved in 1916, and Monk's House (now owned by

500-567: The Clapham Sect ". It was an informal network of an influential group of artists, art critics, writers and an economist, many of whom lived in the West Central 1 district of London known as Bloomsbury . They were "spiritually" similar to the Clapham group who supported its members' careers: "The Bloomsberries promoted one another's work and careers just as the original Claphamites did, as well as

550-717: The Combined English Universities in 1922. As his wife's mental health worsened, Woolf devoted much of his time to caring for her (he himself suffered from depression). In 1917, the Woolfs bought a small hand-operated printing press and with it, they founded the Hogarth Press . Their first project was a pamphlet, hand-printed and bound by themselves. Within ten years the Press had become a full-scale publishing house, issuing Virginia's novels, Leonard's tracts and, among other works,

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600-519: The Contemporary Review from 1920 to 1922. He was literary editor of The Nation and Athenaeum (generally referred to simply as The Nation ) from 1923 to 1930, and joint founder and editor of The Political Quarterly from 1931 to 1959, and for a time he served as secretary of the Labour Party's advisory committees on international and colonial questions. In 1960, Woolf revisited Ceylon and

650-561: The Munich Agreement . Virginia Woolf published her radical feminist polemic Three Guineas that shocked some of her fellow members, including Keynes who had enjoyed the gentler A Room of One's Own (1929). Keynes read his My Early Beliefs to The Memoir Club. Clive Bell published an appeasement pamphlet (he later supported the war), and E. M. Forster wrote an early version of his famous essay " What I Believe " with its choice of personal relations over patriotism: his quiet assertion in

700-564: The National Trust ), in Rodmell , owned by Virginia and Leonard Woolf from 1919. Much about Bloomsbury appears to be controversial, including its membership and name: indeed, some would maintain that "the three words 'the Bloomsbury group' have been so much used as to have become almost unusable". Close friends, brothers, sisters, and even sometimes partners of the friends were not necessarily members of Bloomsbury: Keynes's wife Lydia Lopokova

750-640: The introduction of conscription in 1916 , during the First World War, Woolf was rejected for military service on medical grounds and turned to politics and sociology. He joined the Labour Party and the Fabian Society , and became a regular contributor to the New Statesman . In 1916, he wrote International Government , proposing an international agency to enforce world peace. He stood as the Labour candidate for

800-644: The "Friday Club" and Thoby ran "Thursday Evenings", which became the basis for the Bloomsbury Group, which to some was really "Cambridge in London". Thoby's premature death in 1906 brought them more firmly together and they became what is now known as the "Old Bloomsbury" group who met in earnest beginning in 1912. In the 1920s and 1930s the group shifted when the original members died and the next generation had reached adulthood. The Bloomsbury Group, mostly from upper middle-class professional families, formed part of "an intellectual aristocracy which could trace itself back to

850-453: The 1930s brought new criticism from younger writers of "what the last lot had done (Bloomsbury, Modernism, Eliot) in favour of what they thought of as urgent hard-hitting realism"; while " Wyndham Lewis 's The Apes of God , which called Bloomsbury élitist, corrupt and talentless, caused a stir" of its own. The most telling criticism, however, came perhaps from within the Group's own ranks, when on

900-497: The Apostles they also encountered the analytic philosophers G. E. Moore and Bertrand Russell who were revolutionizing British philosophy at the start of the 20th century. Distinguishing between ends and means was a commonplace of ethics, but what made Moore's Principia Ethica (1903) so important for the philosophical basis of Bloomsbury thought was Moore's conception of intrinsic worth as distinct from instrumental value . As with

950-501: The BBC. John Maynard Keynes's The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money (1936) made him one of the century's most influential economists. He died in 1946 after being much involved in monetary negotiations with the United States. The diversity yet collectivity of Later Bloomsbury's ideas and achievements can be summed up in a series of credos that were made in 1938, the year of

1000-461: The Stephen brothers, were members of "the exclusive Cambridge society, the ' Apostles '". At Trinity in 1899 Lytton Strachey , Leonard Woolf , Saxon Sydney-Turner and Clive Bell became good friends with Thoby Stephen , and it was through Thoby and Adrian Stephen 's sisters Vanessa and Virginia that the men met the women of Bloomsbury when they came down to London. In 1905 Vanessa began

1050-485: The Woolfs founded their Hogarth Press , which would publish T. S. Eliot , Katherine Mansfield , and many others including Virginia herself along with the standard English translations of Freud . Then in 1918 Lytton Strachey published his critique of Victorianism in the shape of four ironic biographies in Eminent Victorians , which added to the arguments about Bloomsbury that continue to this day, and "brought him

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1100-458: The arts." The historian C. J. Coventry , resurrecting an older argument by Raymond Williams , disputes the existence of the group and the extent of its impact, describing it as "curio" for those interested in Keynes and Woolf. All male members of the Bloomsbury Group, except Duncan Grant , were educated at Cambridge (either at Trinity or King's College ). Most of them, except Clive Bell and

1150-476: The background of the Cambridge spies , Andrew Sinclair wrote about the Bloomsbury group: "rarely in the field of human endeavour has so much been written about so few who achieved so little". American philosopher Martha Nussbaum was quoted in 1999 as saying "I don't like anything that sets itself up as an in-group or an elite, whether it is the Bloomsbury group or Derrida ". Raymond Williams saw Bloomsbury as

1200-564: The coming of war again her mental instability recurred, and she drowned herself in 1941. In the previous decade she had become one of the century's most famous feminist writers with three more novels, and a series of essays including the moving late memoir " A Sketch of the Past ". It was also in the 1930s that Desmond MacCarthy became perhaps the most widely read—and heard—literary critic with his columns in The Sunday Times and his broadcasts for

1250-532: The concept of form above content in works of art": it has been suggested that, with their "focus on form ...Bell's ideas have come to stand in for, perhaps too much so, the aesthetic principles of the Bloomsbury Group". The establishment's hostility to post-impressionism made Bloomsbury controversial, and controversial they have remained. Clive Bell polemicized post-impressionism in his widely read book Art (1914), basing his aesthetics partly on Roger Fry's art criticism and G. E. Moore's moral philosophy; and as

1300-508: The couple moved to nearby Hogarth House, Paradise Road. In 1919, the Woolfs purchased the Round House in Pipe Passage, Lewes , East Sussex. The same year, they discovered Monk's House in nearby Rodmell , which both she and Leonard favoured because of its orchard and garden. She then bought Monk's House and sold the Round House. Together, Leonard and Virginia Woolf became influential in

1350-535: The darkening 1930s, Bloomsbury began to die: "Bloomsbury itself was hardly any longer a focus". A year after publishing a collection of brief lives, Portraits in Miniature (1931), Lytton Strachey died; shortly afterwards Carrington shot herself. Roger Fry died in 1934. Vanessa and Clive's eldest son, Julian Bell , was killed in 1937 during the Spanish Civil War . Virginia Woolf wrote Fry's biography , but with

1400-457: The distinction between love (an intrinsic state) and monogamy (a behavior, i.e. instrumental), Moore's differentiation between intrinsic and instrumental value allowed the Bloomsburies to maintain an ethical high-ground based on intrinsic merit, independent of, and without reference to, the consequences of their actions. For Moore, intrinsic value depended on an indeterminable intuition of good and

1450-481: The eve of war Keynes gave a "nostalgic and disillusioned account of the pure sweet air of G. E. Moore, that belief in undisturbed individualism, that Utopianism based on a belief in human reasonableness and decency, that refusal to accept the idea of civilisation as 'a thin and precarious crust' ... Keynes's fond, elegiac repudiation of his "early beliefs", in the light of current affairs ("We completely misunderstood human nature, including our own")". In his book on

1500-544: The face of the increasingly totalitarian claims of both left and right that "personal relations ... love and loyalty to an individual can run counter to the claims of the State". In March 1920 Molly MacCarthy began the Memoir Club to help Desmond and herself write their memoirs; and also "for their friends to regroup after the war (with the proviso that they should always tell the truth)". It met until 1956 or 1964. The club

1550-475: The first edition of T. S. Eliot 's The Waste Land . Woolf continued as the main director of the Press until his death. His wife suffered from severe bouts of mental illness throughout her life, until her suicide by drowning in 1941. Later, Leonard fell in love with a married artist, Trekkie Parsons . In 1919, Woolf became editor of the International Review . He also edited the international section of

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1600-417: The group members show an overlapping, interconnected similarity of ideas and attitudes that helped to keep the friends and relatives together, reflecting in large part the influence of G. E. Moore : "the essence of what Bloomsbury drew from Moore is contained in his statement that 'one's prime objects in life were love, the creation and enjoyment of aesthetic experience and the pursuit of knowledge'". Through

1650-511: The highly successful Howards End in 1910, the group were late developers. There were stable marriages and varied and complicated affairs among the individual members. Lytton Strachey and his cousin and lover Duncan Grant became close friends of the Stephen sisters, Vanessa Bell and Virginia Woolf. Duncan Grant had affairs with siblings Vanessa Bell and Adrian Stephen, as well as David Garnett, Maynard Keynes, and James Strachey. Clive Bell married Vanessa in 1907, and Leonard Woolf returned from

1700-413: The incredulous, weirdly emphasised Strachey voice". After World War I, as the members of the Group "began to be famous, the execration increased, and the caricature of an idle, snobbish and self-congratulatory rentier class , promoting its own brand of high culture began to take shape": as Forster self-mockingly put it, "In came the nice fat dividends, up rose the lofty thoughts". The growing threats of

1750-611: The intervening generations of their grandparents and parents." A historical feature of these friends and relations is that their close relationships all pre-dated their fame as writers, artists, and thinkers. The group had ten core members: In addition to these ten, Leonard Woolf , in the 1960s, listed as "Old Bloomsbury" Adrian and Karin Stephen , Saxon Sydney-Turner , and Molly MacCarthy , with Julian Bell , Quentin Bell and Angelica Bell , and David Garnett as "later additions". Except for Forster, who published three novels before

1800-684: The invention of an ageing and lonely Leonard Woolf , seeking to lift himself and his friends from obscurity. To Williams, the only two so-called "members" of any significance in their respective fields were Keynes and Virginia Woolf. Williams unfavourably compared the Bloomsbury Group to the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and Arts and Crafts movement , finding that the older groups were more radical and consequential. Books and articles Museums and libraries Leonard Woolf Leonard Sidney Woolf ( / ˈ w ʊ l f / ; ( 1880-11-25 ) 25 November 1880 – ( 1969-08-14 ) 14 August 1969)

1850-691: The maximum of pleasure out of their personal relations. If this meant triangles or more complicated geometric figures, well then, one accepted that too". Yet at the same time, they shared a sophisticated, civilized, and highly articulated ideal of pleasure. As Virginia Woolf put it, their "triumph is in having worked out a view of life which was not by any means corrupt or sinister or merely intellectual; rather ascetic and austere indeed; which still holds, and keeps them dining together, and staying together, after 20 years". Politically, Bloomsbury held mainly left-liberal stances (opposed to militarism , for example); but its "clubs and meetings were not activist, like

1900-421: The political organisations to which many of Bloomsbury's members also belonged", and they would be criticised for that by their 1930s successors, who by contrast were "heavily touched by the politics which Bloomsbury had rejected". The campaign for women's suffrage added to the controversial nature of Bloomsbury, as Virginia Woolf represented the group in the fictional The Years and Night and Day works about

1950-650: The suffrage movement. Roger Fry joined the group in 1910. His Post-Impressionist exhibitions of 1910 and 1912 involved Bloomsbury in a second revolution following on the Cambridge philosophical one. This time the Bloomsbury painters were much involved and influenced. Fry and other Bloomsbury artists rejected the traditional distinction between fine and decorative art. These "Bloomsbury assumptions" are reflected in members' criticisms of materialistic realism in painting and fiction, influenced above all by Clive Bell's "concept of 'Significant Form', which separated and elevated

2000-410: The third of ten children of Solomon Rees Sidney Woolf (known as Sidney Woolf), a barrister and Queen's Counsel , and Marie (née de Jongh). His family was Jewish . After his father died in 1892, Woolf was sent to board at Arlington House School near Brighton , Sussex. From 1894 to 1899, he attended St Paul's School , and in 1899 he won a classical scholarship to Trinity College, Cambridge , where he

2050-610: The triumph he had always longed for ... The book was a sensation". The following year came J. M. Keynes's influential attack on the Versailles Peace Treaty : The Economic Consequences of the Peace established Maynard as a Neo-Classical economist and political economist of international eminence. Bloomsbury members became known for distinctive garments; Woolf in particular was opposed to conventions surrounding formal attire, such as "dressing for dinner". The 1920s were in

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2100-532: The upheavals and dislocations of war, in many ways were even strengthened by them". Most but not all of them were conscientious objectors. Politically, the members of Bloomsbury had liberal and socialist leanings. Though the war dispersed Old Bloomsbury, the individuals continued to develop their careers. E. M. Forster followed his successful novels with Maurice which he could not publish because it treated homosexuality untragically. In 1915, Virginia Woolf brought out her first novel, The Voyage Out ; and in 1917

2150-502: The war came he argued that "in these days of storm and darkness, it seemed right that at the shrine of civilization - in Bloomsbury, I mean - the lamp should be tended assiduously". Old Bloomsbury's development was affected, along with much of modernist culture, by the First World War : "the small world of Bloomsbury was later said by some on its outskirts to have been irretrievably shattered", though in fact its friendships "survived

2200-416: Was a British political theorist , author, publisher, and civil servant. He was married to author Virginia Woolf . As a member of the Labour Party and the Fabian Society , Woolf was an avid publisher of his own work and his wife's novels. A writer himself, Woolf created nineteen individual works and wrote six autobiographies. Leonard and Virginia did not have any children. Woolf was born in London in 1880

2250-573: Was also an author. His brother Cecil Nathan Sidney Woolf was the author of Poems (published 1918); Cecil was killed in World War I in 1917. His dissertation Bartolus of Sassoferrato, his Position in the History of Medieval Political Thought was expanded to a book published by Cambridge University Press in 1913 in collaboration with his brother Philip. Philip and Cecil also translated Stendhal's On Love (Duckworth, 1915). Woolf died on 14 August 1969 from

2300-566: Was elected to the Cambridge Apostles . Other contemporary members included Lytton Strachey , John Maynard Keynes , G. E. Moore , and E. M. Forster . Thoby Stephen (his future wife's brother) was friendly with the Apostles, though not a member himself. Woolf was awarded his BA in 1902 but stayed there for another year to study for the Civil Service examinations held then. In October 1904, Woolf moved to Ceylon (now Sri Lanka ) to become

2350-508: Was made up of members of the Bloomsbury Group, a loose collective of artists, writers, intellectuals, and philosophers. Some of the core members of the Bloomsbury Group included Virginia Woolf, Leonard Woolf, Vanessa Bell, Clive Bell, John Maynard Keynes, Roger Fry, E.M. Forster, Lytton Strachey, Sir Desmond MacCarthy, and Duncan Grant. Early complaints focused on a perceived cliquiness: "on personal mannerisms—the favourite phrases ('ex-quisitely civilized', and 'How simply too extraordinary!'),

2400-465: Was only reluctantly accepted into the group, and there were certainly "writers who were at some time close friends of Virginia Woolf, but who were distinctly not 'Bloomsbury': T. S. Eliot , Katherine Mansfield , Hugh Walpole ". Another is Vita Sackville-West , who became " Hogarth Press 's best-selling author". Members cited in "other lists might include Ottoline Morrell , or Dora Carrington , or James and Alix Strachey ". The lives and works of

2450-507: Was surprised at the warmth of the welcome he received, and even the fact that he was still remembered. Woolf accepted an honorary doctorate from the then-new University of Sussex in 1964 and in 1965 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature . He declined the offer of Companion of Honour (CH) in the Queen's Birthday Honours list in 1966. Among his nine siblings, Bella Woolf

2500-601: Was written by Sue Limb and produced by Little Brother Productions for the BBC. Bloomsbury Group The Bloomsbury Group was a group of associated British writers, intellectuals, philosophers and artists in the early 20th century. Among the people involved in the group were Virginia Woolf , John Maynard Keynes , E. M. Forster , Vanessa Bell , and Lytton Strachey . Their works and outlook deeply influenced literature , aesthetics , criticism , and economics , as well as modern attitudes towards feminism , pacifism , and sexuality . Although popularly thought of as

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