Leafy London squares, boldly painted furniture, cottage-style gardens and unorthodox ménages: the loose circle of writers and artists which came to be known as the Bloomsbury Group are perhaps as well-known for their aesthetic tastes and personal lives as for the works which are their cultural legacy. Yet, when they first began to meet on Thursday evenings in a then-unfashionable part of London, the founding of a cohesive movement that would profoundly influence 20th century intellectual and artistic life was certainly not their intention. Indeed, it may seem unclear to us how a group of like-minded young people gathering together for conversation and cocoa might have seemed radical or subversive, and yet there was something about these gatherings which caused Virginia Woolf, looking back in 1928, to remark that ‘ne had glimpses of something miraculous happening high up in the air’. Virginia’s sister Vanessa perhaps put her finger on what made it remarkable: ‘There was nothing at all unusual about it I daresay, except that for some reason we seemed to be a company of the young, all free, all beginning life in new surroundings, without elders to whom we had to account in any way for our doings or behaviour, and this was not then common in a mixed company of our class’.
A group at Garsington Manor, country home of Lady Ottoline Morrell, near Oxford. Left to right: Lady Ottoline Morrell, Mrs. Aldous Huxley, Lytton Strachey, Duncan Grant, and Vanessa Bell by unknown photographer, vintage snapshot print, July 1915.
Nothing so formal as a ‘group’ the ‘Bloomsberries’ (as they were sometimes called) had no manifesto and no official list of members. The fluid boundaries of the group are well-documented and generally accepted to orbit around the Stephen sisters, Vanessa and Virginia, and their later husbands, Clive Bell and Leonard Woolf, the artists Roger Fry and Duncan Grant, the economist John Maynard Keynes and the writers E. M. Forster and Lytton Strachey, but could be almost infinitely extended to include lovers, admirers, acquaintances and other peripheral figures. Some of the most notable of these are Adrian and Karin Stephen, Saxon Sydney-Turner, and Molly MacCarthy, with Julian Bell, Quentin Bell and Angelica Bell, David Garnett and Vita Sackville-West. The purpose of their meetings was, simply, frank and open conversation. No topics were off-limits; sex and sexuality were as often discussed as philosophy, art and literature, and such a level of social candour was certainly not typical for the time. Sexual freedom was, decades before the emancipatory movements of the 1960’s, one of the central ideals of this group of friends, and the complicated swapping of partners and mingling of households is surely one of reasons that interest in the group has remained strong in popular culture, to be explored in novels, biographies and TV series.
The more sensational aspects of their domestic arrangements aside, however, the truly extraordinary thing about this group of friends is the diverse body of work they left behind. Of social and artistic importance and not inconsiderable beauty, the works which have proved seminal in a variety of fields and are, unsurprisingly, highly collectible. We have brought together a selection here which charts the diversity and importance of their output.
The similarity of ideals and values reflected in the work of the Bloomsbury group was drawn in large part from G. E. Moore’s most famous work. Ideas were shared between the Bloomsbury group and the Cambridge society known as the Apostles, of whom Moore and Vanessa and Virginia’s brother Thoby were both members. Though not himself a central figure of the Bloomsbury group, Moore’s work provided the group with what Clive Bell referred to as their ‘religion’. Its foregrounding of personal life over other social connections and distinction between intrinsic worth and instrumental value inspired both the ethical and aesthetic principles of the group’s members and can be traced in the work of Virginia Woolf, Clive Bell and others. In his turn, Moore took from the Bloomsbury Group ‘a profound, and perhaps exaggerated, sense of the value of friendship and art, they took from him the thought that lives dedicated to these values were indeed lives well spent.’ (ODNB)
Roger Fry, Twelve Original Woodcuts, Hogarth Press, 1921 – SOLD
Hand printed by Leonard and Virginia, this book was one of the early successes of The Hogarth Press. Established in 1917, initially as a hobby, and begin on a hand press in the Woolf’s dining room in their house in Richmond. Works printed by the Hogarth Press were initially drawn fromt he circle of their Bloomsbury associates, and members of the group pitched in to help with the production. Laterly, however, the press moved to larger premises in the heart of Bloomsbury and became a commercial operation, publishing a broad range of subject matters.
Roger Fry was one of the Bloomsbury Group’s core members and contributed largely to their aesthetic tastes and values. His work was experimental and controversial, and his establishment of the Omega Workshops in Fitzroy Square in 1913 brought together a group of young artists to express the visual sentiments of the Bloomsbury Group. He sought to break down the distinction between the decorative and the fictional, producing furniture painted with bright designs in the post-impressionist style.
This item is extremely fragile and rare to find in the original wallpaper wrappers. The impressin of a removed bookplate tells us that this particular copy belonged to Angelica Garnett, daughter of Vanessa and Clive Bell.
E. M. Forster, Howards End, Edward Arnold, 1910 – SOLD
Forster was another member who made his way into the Bloomsbury Group through the Cambridge Apostles, although he remained on the periphery and was never a central figure of the group. The ideals of the group can, however, be found in this and other novels of Forster’s, particularly the influence of Moore and his emphasis on personal relationships and the search for intrinsic value. As in many of Woolf’s novels, Forster examines the legacy of the Victorian age on the new generation, with a marked uneasiness about the simultaneous feelings of rejection and indebtedness to the social constructs on the preceding era.
A first edition, this copy belonged to Maurice Baring, and bears his inscription a bookplate. Bearing was a friend of Forster’s from Cambridge, loosely connected with both the Apostles and the Bloomsbury Group.
Another of the group of Cambridge friends who continued their association afterwards, Keynes was a intimately linked with the Bloomsbury Group and an avid collector of art and books. Although many of his relationships were with men – among them Lytton Strachey and Duncan Grant – he later went on to marry Russian ballerina Lydia Lopokova.
Keynes’ work gave structure to the social ideals of the group and his pursuit of the question of how best to live life and to ascribe values to things was in sympathy with that of his artistic friends. Keynes’ economic principles had their roots in the belief that utility ought not to be the end of all human activity and was in this way linked with the wider themes of the work put out by other members.
Vanessa Bell’s illustrations and dust jacket designs for her sister’s books exemplify the Bloomsbury aesthetic and have become iconic. Jacob’s Room is the first such collaboration between the sisters and represents an extraordinary unity of artistic ambition in their respective mediums. A departure from her two previous novels, Jacob’s Room is Woolf’s first attempt at a post-impressionistic portrait of a character. Jacob, who is based on Virginia’s brother Thoby who died 1906, is recalled posthumously through the fragmentary recollections an impressions of characters who knew him. This approach was experimental and renders Jacob’s Room an extremely important achievement of Modernist fiction. It was also the first book-length publication to be produced by the Hogarth Press and marks their transition into serious commercial publication.
This extraordinary first edition copy is inscribed from Virginia to Vanessa: ‘Vanessa Bell from V.W. Oct. 1922’.
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In the spirit of Valentine’s Day, and happily without the expected recital of the Sonnets, we’ve put together a list of literary greats as they fawn over one another in displays of love, mentorship and camaraderie. There were so many examples, in fact , that this blog will be a two-parter. Check back next week for the second installment.
Anaïs Nin & Henry Miller
Over the course of a correspondence that lasted more than twenty years, Nin and Miller came to represent the bohemian ideal of both love and sex in modern times. Their adventures in Paris together at the break of the Second World War – Nin married but somewhat estranged from her husband; Miller married and encouraging both his wife and Nin on a venture of sexual discovery – culminated in a furious love affair and an inimical divorce.
Scenario (A film with sound) by Henry Miller, published 1937, first edition, first printing, inscribed by the author to Hans Reichel
The following excerpts are taken from various letters written and received in the early 1930’s, firstly from Nin to Miller…
“You destroy and you suffer… I often see how you sob over what you destroy, how you want to stop and just worship; and you do stop, and then a moment later you are at it again with a knife, like a surgeon.
In some strange way I am not with you, I am against you. We are destined to hold two truths. I love you and I fight you.
And you, the same. We will be stronger for it, each of us, stronger with our love and our hate.”
“Something stirs in me as I look at it, and it is certainly the human you. It is a vision of the human you revealing an amazing delicacy to me. It is your khaki shirt and you are the man who is the axis of my world now. I revolve around the richness of your being.
‘Come closer to me, come closer. I promise you it will be beautiful.’
You keep your promise.”
…with examples of Miller’s own declarations of love in 1932 equally impassioned, as follows:
“Anais:
Don’t expect me to be sane anymore. Don’t let’s be sensible. It was a marriage at Louveciennes—you can’t dispute it. I came away with pieces of you sticking to me; I am walking about, swimming, in an ocean of blood, your Andalusian blood, distilled and poisonous. You became a woman with me. I was almost terrified by it. You are not just thirty years old—you are a thousand years old.
Here I am back and still smouldering with passion, like wine smoking. Not a passion any longer for flesh, but a complete hunger for you, a devouring hunger. I read the paper about suicides and murders and I understand it all thoroughly. I feel murderous, suicidal. I feel somehow that it is a disgrace to do nothing, to just bide one’s time, to take it philosophically, to be sensible. Where has gone the time when men fought, killed, died for a glove, a glance, etc?”
Eventually, through the intensity of both their passion for each other and the pressures and pleasures of their many respective lovers, Nin and Miller allowed themselves to drift apart. Their lives remained inescapably interwoven until Anaïs’ death in 1977.
Oscar Wilde and Lord Alfred Douglas
The written evidence of Wilde and Douglas’ love affair was given up to the scrutiny of the courts during the now infamous trial of the former, condemning the duo utterly in the eyes of 1895’s outraged intolerance.
Wilde to Douglas, 1985:
My Own Boy,
Your sonnet is quite lovely, and it is a marvel that those red-roseleaf lips of yours should be made no less for the madness of music and song than for the madness of kissing. Your slim gilt soul walks between passion and poetry. I know Hyacinthus, whom Apollo loved so madly, was you in Greek days. Why are you alone in London, and when do you go to Salisbury? Do go there to cool your hands in the grey twilight of Gothic things, and come here whenever you like. It is a lovely place and lacks only you; but go to Salisbury first.
Always, with undying love,
Yours, Oscar
The Ballad of Reading Gaol. By C.3.3. (Oscar Wilde), first edition, first printing, with a poem on verso title page written by George Ives condemning Wilde’s betrayers.
Douglas to Wilde, 1897:
My dearest Oscar,
My time with you just now was such a glorious reunion. I can still feel the effect of your hands on my skin, your lips against mine. I cannot wait to see you again, even now my thoughts are only of you and being near you. I can hardly bear it, this distance between us. Only knowing it is temporary makes it something which I can endure.
You are right to say that things must begin fresh, that we must build something new. Things will be different when we are in Naples. There is so much art, so much architecture – your body and mine. That will remain the same, at least.
I long to feel your lips against my skin – all of my skin, all of it, everywhere.
I remain your darling boy, now and always,
Bosie.
Fifteen years his senior, Wilde was accused by Douglas’ father, the Marquess of Queensberry, of attempting to corrupt his son. While the court case remains much quoted along with the poet-playwright himself, the letters are not so much in the public eye. Imprisoned for Gross Indecency in 1895, Wilde wrote a 50,000 word letter to Douglas that he was allowed to keep upon his release. De Profundis or, From the Depths, serves as an account of all that happened, and all that the artist felt. The last letter Wilde wrote to Douglas before his imprisonment in 1895 is this:
My dearest boy,
This is to assure you of my immortal, my eternal love for you. Tomorrow all will be over. If prison and dishonour be my destiny, think that my love for you and this idea, this still more divine belief, that you love me in return will sustain me in my unhappiness and will make me capable, I hope, of bearing my grief most patiently. Since the hope, nay rather the certainty, of meeting you again in some world is the goal and the encouragement of my present life, ah! I must continue to live in this world because of that.
Wilde spent the last three years of his life abroad in exile, where he was joined for a matter of months by Douglas until they were separated by their families with the threat of a cutting-off of funds.
In the autumn of 1900, Wilde realised he was dying of meningitis, related to an injury sustained in prison, yet Douglas did not return to be with him when he died. Douglas went on to live for another 45 years, marrying two years after Wilde’s death, and later condemning both his past lover’s works and his homosexuality.
Virgina Woolf and Vita Sackville-West
The most famous of Virginia Woolf’s affairs was with The Hon Victoria Mary Sackville-West, Lady Nicolson, more commonly known to contemporary readers as Vita Sackville-West. First meeting in 1922, having both belonged to social circles that accepted sexual exploration if not endorsed it entirely, the two women fell into a passionate relationship that transformed them both.
Jacob’s Room by Virginia Woolf, published 1922, first edition, first impression, one of 1200.
Woolf to West, 1926:
“Look here Vita — throw over your man, and we’ll go to Hampton Court and dine on the river together and walk in the garden in the moonlight and come home late and have a bottle of wine and get tipsy, and I’ll tell you all the things I have in my head, millions, myriads — They won’t stir by day, only by dark on the river. Think of that. Throw over your man, I say, and come.”
West to Woolf 1927:
“…I am reduced to a thing that wants Virginia. I composed a beautiful letter to you in the sleepless nightmare hours of the night, and it has all gone: I just miss you, in a quite simple desperate human way. You, with all your undumb letters, would never write so elementary a phrase as that; perhaps you wouldn’t even feel it. And yet I believe you’ll be sensible of a little gap. But you’d clothe it in so exquisite a phrase that it should lose a little of its reality. Whereas with me it is quite stark: I miss you even more than I could have believed; and I was prepared to miss you a good deal. So this letter is really just a squeal of pain. It is incredible how essential to me you have become. I suppose you are accustomed to people saying these things. Damn you, spoilt creature; I shan’t make you love me any more by giving myself away like this — But oh my dear, I can’t be clever and stand-offish with you: I love you too much for that. Too truly. You have no idea how stand-offish I can be with people I don’t love. I have brought it to a fine art. But you have broken down my defences. And I don’t really resent it….”
Perhaps the greatest love letter from the author to the Lady was her novel Orlando, written as a tribute. A small act of revenge in retaliation to one of their many disputes, it is also an act of affection, in which Woolf restores one of Vita’s most desired possessions, family estate Knole House. Their affair lasted until late 1927 or perhaps early 1928, though their friendship continued until Woolf’s suicide in 1941.
Hand printed by Leonard and Virginia, this book was one of the early successes of The Hogarth Press. Established in 1917, initially as a hobby, and begin on a hand press in the Woolf’s dining room in their house in Richmond. Works printed by the Hogarth Press were initially drawn fromt he circle of their Bloomsbury associates, and members of the group pitched in to help with the production. Laterly, however, the press moved to larger premises in the heart of Bloomsbury and became a commercial operation, publishing a broad range of subject matters.
Another of the group of Cambridge friends who continued their association afterwards, Keynes was a intimately linked with the Bloomsbury Group and an avid collector of art and books. Although many of his relationships were with men – among them Lytton Strachey and Duncan Grant – he later went on to marry Russian ballerina Lydia Lopokova.
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