Talk:Bloomsbury Group

A bit preachy

I thought that

"but he remained reticent about the sexual lives of the members, as had the excerpts from Virginia’s diary. Subsequent biographies of Strachey then Virginia Woolf, Forster, Keynes, Fry, Vanessa Bell, and Grant removed all veils. Indeed much of the interest in Bloomsbury has become biographically driven, yet it was their achievements as writers, artists, and thinkers that made their lives notable."

sounded a bit preachy, so I replaced it by

"he remained reticent about the sexual lives of the members, as had the excerpts from Virginia’s diary. Subsequent biographies of Strachey then Virginia Woolf, Forster, Keynes, Fry, Vanessa Bell, and Grant removed all veils. Indeed much of the interest in Bloomsbury has become biographically driven, as compared to scholarly interest."

Rodrigo de Salvo Braz (talk) 05:17, 23 May 2008 (UTC)

Strachey a critic

Small point, but it seems strange that Lytton Strachey is referred to as being in the literary realm, while Desmond MacCarthy is specifically referred to as a critic. Obviously Strachey was primarily a critic. - Makrugaik.

Re-write

I am not remotely knowledgeable about this group but the article seems to me to be rather haphazard in organization, and could use a serious rewrite to improve things... --Wspencer11 (talk to me...) 15:29, 5 September 2006 (UTC)

If you re-write the article, please be so kind to add George Edward Moore, one of the more famous members of the group. (Wasn't Bertrand Russell a member as well?) --83.134.82.243 16:21, 19 April 2007 (UTC)

G.E. Moore certainly deserves mention in this article, but he was NOT a member of the Bloomsbury Group itself. He was a member of the Cambridge Apostles, and his book Principia Ethica was an enormous influence on the group, but he did not spend much social time with Strachey, Woolf, etc. The same is true of Bertrand Russell.--JLeland 23:35, 28 August 2007 (UTC)

I believe that Maynard Keynes' contributions to the group are decidedly understated in this entry. It would seem fitting that his contributions to modern macroeconomics (ie. he invented it!) as well as his funding of many of Bloomsbury's artistic pursuits, and his role as editor of Nation should receive mention.(MK) —Preceding unsigned comment added by 63.76.213.5 (talk) 21:19, 3 October 2007 (UTC)

E. M. Forster was NOT a member of the Bloomsbury group (which is curiously capitalized as "Group" in the article), at least as Bloomsbury biographer Leon Edel has it -- and I trust his judgment far more than I do Wikipedians. Indeed, in the many volumes of Virginia Woolf's letters, published in the 1970s and 1980s, letters to Forster are few and far between. Forster was well acquainted with the Bloomsburies, but he was a peripheral figure. The core group consisted of: Virginia Woolf, Leonard Woolf, Clive Bell, Vanessa Bell, Roger Fry, Duncan Grant, Maynard Keynes, Lytton Strachey, and Desmond McCarthy.

Please sign your posts, thank you! Four tildes in a bracket. (Truthbody (talk) 20:49, 6 December 2008 (UTC))

Notable influence

Patti Smith is certainly notable, the influence should be sourced. 'Most' is opinion. Jude Rawlins is not notable, certainly in the company of either the Bloomsbury set or Patti Smith. The sentence requires multiple influenced artists. Any obvious replacements to keep this sentence, with relevant reference? Millichip 17:46, 11 January 2007 (UTC)

Evelyn Waugh was emphatically not a member of the Bloomsbury group. His early political leanings were decidedly right-ward, and he grew more curmudgeonly as he aged. His novel Brideshead Revisited includes a gentle stab at Bloomsbury, when Charles Ryder discards as unsatisfactory a work of art from Roger Fry's Omega Workshop after his first meeting with Sebastian Flyte. Additionally, Waugh was harshly critical of the whole "stream of consciousness" technique of novel writing, and as a devout Roman Catholic, he certainly would have disapproved of Bloomsbury's hostility to Christianity. (Perhaps his name was confused with someone else's, but I'm not sure who.) 23 July 2010 70.153.137.191 (talk) 18:53, 23 July 2010 (UTC)

Sources

this page could use some citations. I don't know enough about the issue to say when, where, what. but I heard a ph.d in vicorian lit present the bloomsbury group very differently i.e. that the group themselves never used the phrase, and that much of the "information" about the group is p.c. myth. just what i heard.

Most of the text seems to have been lifted straight from this page: http://www.ciarb.org/meeting-room-hire/history/ —Preceding unsigned comment added by 89.206.227.99 (talk) 15:34, 25 October 2010 (UTC)

In reality its the URL which has reproduced the Wikipedia article as acknowledged below the text by the website! Tmol42 (talk) 15:39, 25 October 2010 (UTC)

The other side

Why is there nothing about the other side of the Bloomsbury set? Although they paid lip service to the left, most were of very posh origins, and also acted in an elitist manner. While some worship at their altar, others just think of them as a gallivanting bunch of upper class brats.--MacRusgail 15:51, 29 July 2007 (UTC)

Find some sources, phrase it well and add it in. Methulah 14:25, 12 November 2007 (UTC)

New Article

An entirely new article on the Bloomsbury Group has been added.

Clapham Sect

I am listening to Laurie Taylor’s BBC Radio 4 programme Thinking Allowed whose learned guests claim that half of the Bloomsbury Group are descendants of the Clapham Sect. This needs to be added and elaborated. – Kaihsu (talk) 16:25, 23 December 2009 (UTC)

I listened to the BBC I-Player recording. Adam Kuper was the main proponent on the connection. Although it was broadly supported by the other contributors of the programme they also pointed out that beyond the genealogical connections of some of the families involved caution was needed to avoid drawing too many conclusions from this so it might be considered falling foul of WP:FRINGE. Hopefully someone with a more thorough grounding in the Bloomsbury Set could take a look at Kuper's hypothesis in his latest book Incest & influence: the private life of bourgeois England available online, see page 240' here, which might provide a cite for any addition to the article considered worthy of inclusion. Tmol42 (talk) 22:16, 23 December 2009 (UTC)

The Clapham Sect background of Bloomsbury has been discussed in S. P. Rosenbaum's "'Victorian Bloomsbury'" (1987) —Preceding unsigned comment added by Stanpat (talk • contribs) 21:10, 29 December 2009 (UTC)

Quip

I seem to recall the quip (it may have been by Andrew Sinclair) "Never in human history has so much been written about so few who achieved so little". Xxanthippe (talk) 04:35, 27 August 2012 (UTC).

The diagram File:Bloomsbury.gif needs editing to change Mary McCarthy to Molly McCarthy and include G H Hardy, who was loosely connected to the group and was one of the few of its members to have left any lasting achievement behind him (another was Keynes). Xxanthippe (talk) 00:51, 4 September 2012 (UTC).

Revised image to change Mary to Molly MacCarthy. Hardy, like many many others appears to have been very much more peripheral to the Group than those included.Tmol42 (talk) 21:00, 13 September 2012 (UTC)

Thanks for the change. Hardy, unlike many many others, actually achieved something. Xxanthippe (talk) 22:47, 13 September 2012 (UTC).

I guess it just depends on what one appreciates to judge achievement. Takes all sorts I guess.Tmol42 (talk) 23:13, 13 September 2012 (UTC)

Yup, it's a matter of judgement. My impression is that general opinion of the Bloomsbury Group has shifted (for the worse) in the last 30-40 years. Xxanthippe (talk) 00:18, 14 September 2012 (UTC).

Uncited info

I worked on finding sources for some of the uncited content. The remaining uncited content that needs sources is:

Later Bloomsbury

• thus bringing the members of Old Bloomsbury back together. The comedy of a group of friends in their forties reading one another their memoirs was not lost on Bloomsbury. Many of the ensuing memoirs, such as Virginia Woolf on her Hyde Park Gate home and Maynard Keynes on his early beliefs, are ironic in ways not always recognized by later commentators. The Memoir Club testifies to the continuing cohesion of Bloomsbury. For the next thirty years they came together in irregular meetings to write about the memories they shared in growing up together, at college, and later in Bloomsbury. The members of The Memoir Club were not quite equivalent to those of Old Bloomsbury, however; the club did not include Adrian Stephen, for example, or Sydney-Turner, who certainly belonged to Old Bloomsbury. Yet all but one of the other members belonged to Old Bloomsbury, and indeed Old Bloomsbury itself became a popular subject for the Club’s memoirs.
• Leonard, who had helped formulate proposals for the League of Nations during the war, offered his own views on the subject in Imperialism and Civilization (1928). In many respects throughout its history Bloomsbury’s most incisive critics came from within.

Memoir Club

• Younger members of the group and the club included the writer David Garnett, and later his wife Angelica Garnett, the daughter of Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant. Her half-brother the artist and writer Quentin Bell eventually became the club’s secretary, and later wrote his aunt’s biography. Sister and brother wrote very different memoirs about Bloomsbury, Angelica’s being Deceived by Kindness (1984) and Quentin’s Elders and Betters (1995). Among other younger members were Lytton’s niece the writer Julia Strachey, and the diarist Frances Partridge who had married into Lytton Strachey’s ménage in the 1930s.
• Following Virginia’s death Leonard Woolf began editing collections of her writings including a selection from her diaries, A Writer’s Diary (1953), which revealed publicly for the first time what the Bloomsbury Group had been like. Leonard’s own volumes of autobiography in the 1960s (he died in 1969) gave the fullest account, but he remained reticent about the sexual lives of the members, as had the excerpts from Virginia’s diary. Subsequent biographies of Strachey then Virginia Woolf, Forster, Keynes, Fry, Vanessa Bell, and Grant removed all veils. Indeed much of the interest in Bloomsbury has been biographically driven, yet it is their achievements as writers, artists, and thinkers that have ultimately made their lives biographically interesting. The case of Virginia Woolf provides an example. There have now been more than half a dozen biographies of her, yet a good deal of the basic scholarship of locating and editing her work remains unfinished; significant unpublished writings of hers are still being found in library archives.
• The Bloomsbury Group has featured in many works of fiction, including, notably, Michael Cunningham's The Hours and Susan Sellers' Vanessa and Virginia.

Criticism

• However controversy continues to accompany Bloomsbury wherever it goes. Much work on Bloomsbury continues to focus on the group’s class origins and alleged elitism, their satire, their atheism, their oppositional politics and interventionist economics, their non-abstract art, their modernist fiction, their art and literary criticism, and their non-nuclear family and sexual arrangements.

Rosenbaum's book may be a great source of much of this info.--CaroleHenson (talk) 19:09, 20 January 2014 (UTC)

ascension parish burial ground, cambridge

Two members of the Bloomsbury Group are buried in the Ascension Parish Burial Ground, Cambridge: Sir Desmond and Lady (Molly) McCarthy; there are also another nine members of the Cambridge Apostles buried in the same cemetery. Desmond McCarthy was an Apostle, and together with his wife formed the "Memoirs Club."

http://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=gr&GSln=macCarthy&GSiman=1&GScid=859628&GRid=10462474

http://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=gr&GRid=34797344

FOR CAROLE HENSON IN THE US

2.27.132.10 (talk) 19:00, 4 April 2014 (UTC)

cool, done.--CaroleHenson (talk) 20:03, 4 April 2014 (UTC)

JULIAN BELL

Detailed overview of the better and lesser known members of the Bloomsbury Group

JULIAN BELL was a Cambridge Apostle, but he is not shown as one in the above graphic! Martin.

2.27.132.8 (talk) 17:17, 12 August 2014 (UTC)

COI

See: Wikipedia:Administrators'_noticeboard/IncidentArchive851#Enough_is_enough. The Banner talk 16:28, 17 September 2014 (UTC)

Sorry? I've read the whole section (and thanks for going through this) but I fail to see anything about COI in there, hence I reverted.[1] What sort of COI do you have in mind? If I remember correctly most of their works are in the public domain now and most of them didn't have (alive) sons, so a one-line explanation would be appreciated. --Nemo 16:16, 20 September 2014 (UTC)

The Martin mentioned in the section above is a self-styled expert about the Bloomsbury Group, the Cambridge Apostels and the Ascension Parish Burial Ground, acting under a large number of IPs. He was constantly claiming to know it all, that all persons mentioned were properly sourced in their own articles (a quick look reveals that that is only the case in a small number) and that all other people, especially foreigners, were automatically wrong in their criticism. The COI refers primarily to his self-styled status as expert filling the list. Due to the constant battle and personal attacks of "Martin", I never took time to really check the article and throw everybody out who is not sourced to be a member of the Bloombury Group. The Banner talk 16:45, 20 September 2014 (UTC)

Given that as far as I understand it all of Martin's edits have now been reversed where does the concern leading to a COI tag arise from? Tmol42 (talk) 17:00, 20 September 2014 (UTC)

Oops, did not look proper. This was the least affected article of his work. As you two vouch that this article is reliable or within reach of becoming fully reliable again, you can remove the tag. The Banner talk 17:27, 20 September 2014 (UTC)

Done.Tmol42 (talk) 18:38, 20 September 2014 (UTC)

Victorianism

@Xxanthippe: This link points to an unhelpful disambiguation page, which includes among other things Victorian America and Victoria, Australia. My attempted repair may not have been best, but the link needs to be repaired somehow - see WP:INTDABLINK. Narky Blert (talk) 11:30, 30 August 2016 (UTC)

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Saxon Sydney-Turner

Have added B/D dates to his article and also comments from his Times Obituary by L. W. who I presume is Leonard Woolf? Hugo999 (talk) 01:55, 18 August 2018 (UTC)

Did they actually exist?

It is worth mentioning that some critics have questioned the existence of this group. The individuals obviously existed but some had little or nothing to do with each other, or in common, and it is certainly not a movement. They seemed to have lived in London, but that's it in some cases. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 109.249.184.207 (talk) 08:38, 31 May 2020 (UTC)

To 5 edit IP: "Some critics". Let's have a source then. Xxanthippe (talk) 09:24, 31 May 2020 (UTC).