Saxon Sydney-Turner was an unusual member of the Bloomsbury Group in that he was not at all creative, and was renowned as a social bore. Even though he graduated from Cambridge with a double first, he retreated into an undistinguished job in the civil service and stayed there all his life. He wasn't gay; he had very little love interest; and he gambled away all his money. The full downbeat story is here
I'm starting a new series of potted biographies of Bloomsbury Group luminaries. Nina Hamnet was a painter from Wales who swept into Bohemian life, meeting Amedeo Modigliani on her first night in Montparnasse - and going on to befriend (and bed) just about everyone who was anyone on both sides of the Channel. She worked at the Omega Workshops with Roger Fry, and then in the 1920s went into a alcoholic nose dive from which she never recovers. The full story is here
Charleston is a farmhouse near Lewes, Sussex which was once the home of Clive Bell, his wife Vanessa, and her lover Duncan Grant. Leonard and Virginia Woolf were frequent visitors from their own country property at Monk's House in nearby Rodmell. Other members of the Bloomsbury Group such as Lytton Strachey, David Garnett, and Maynard Keynes were regular visitors. It is most famous for the fact that Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant covered the entire surface of the house - walls, fireplace, cupboards, tables, chairs - with their decorations and paintings, an impulse that was also part of the Omega Workshops movement initiated by Roger Fry around the same time during the first world war. [A subsidiary purpose of the house was to act as a refuge for conscientious objectors to the war.]... more >>
These are archive recordings taken from long-unheard BBC broadcasts and recording from the Charleston Trust, many of them published here for the first time. They come in a two-CD boxed set, accompanied by a sixteen page explanatory booklet. Contributors to the Virginia Woolf Internet discussion group often comment on how astonishing it is to hear these voices from the past - and how remarkable their accents seem to us now. Remember that Woolf began writing over a hundred years ago, and her father married Thackeray's daughter - so these recordings carry with them direct links back as far as the Victorian era... Read more >>
This book was produced to coincide with the exhibition of Hogarth Press publications which ran from February to April 2009 at the library of the University of Alberta, Canada. It's not only a wonderful collection of cover designs, book jackets, and illustrations - but a beautiful example of book production in its own right. It's typeset in Caslon Old Face, which Leonard and Virginia Woolf used when they first set up the Hogarth Press on a table in their dining room in 1917. The book's dust jacket is printed on thick, richly textured paper with some of the exuberantly patterned papers originally used by the Press. It also features both of the woolf's-head logos used by the Press, designed by Vanessa Bell and E. McKnight Kauffer. Even the interior pages of the book are coloured, using tints and washes which are a tonal echo of the original designs... Read more >>
The Edwardians first appeared in 1930, and was a deliberate attempt on Vita Sackville-West's part to write a best-seller. The amazing thing is that like so many of the other things she did in her rich and unusual life, she succeeded. It sold 20,000 copies in its first two months, outstripping the success of her friend, lover, and fellow author Virginia Woolf. It's a story of the aristocratic milieu from which she herself sprang, and is a rich blend of sentimental nostalgia for a world which had almost disappeared by the time she came to write it, and a critical analysis of some of the reasons why that disappearance occurred. The principal characters are from a single grand family: Lucy a widowed baroness, Sebastian her young Duke-to-be son, his sister Viola, and the glamorous Lady Roehampton who becomes his mistress. But the main character is the Elizabethan house where they live - served by its small army ... Read more >>
This is the jacket cover of the first edition, published in 1921 by Leonard Woolf and Virginia Woolf at the Hogarth Press. 150 copies were printed. Squarish octavo, unpaginated, title page + 12 original woodcuts, each printed on a separate sheet.
A copy of the third impression, printed in 1922 is currently described as: "Internally the pages are bright and clean, and the woodcuts are good impressions. The original wrapper has a small closed tear along the front top edge, and a bit of light soiling, otherwise in very good condition. Very scarce in any of the impressions. Price $3,000.00"
See digital slide show of this publication at Duke University Library
I've been looking into the history of the Hogarth Press and marvelling that what started as a therapeutic hobby for Virginia Woolf could grow under the skillful direction of her husband Leonard into a major cultural force which embraced literature, politics, and philosophy. Mind you, it helped that they were friends with some of the most creative intellectuals of the modernist movement at that time.
Most recently I've been annotating a series of pages featuring the original jacket covers from their publications. I'll post some of the more interesting of these here from time to time. Below is a small sample.
full gallery of Hogarth Press book jackets here
This is an unusually exciting event for Woolf fans - the first publication of an undiscovered notebook which had been lost for seventy years. It was written in 1909 when Virginia Woolf was living with her brother Adrian in Fitzroy Square. She was struggling with her first Novel, The Voyage Out and wondering if she would ever be married. It was discovered only a couple of years ago, in Birmingham. The contents of the notebook (which she made herself, by hand) are a series of seven portraits written, as she says of them herself as a sort of artist's notebook: "the only use of this book is that it shall serve for a sketch book; as an artist fills his pages with scraps and fragments, studies of drapery - legs, arms & noses ... so I take up my pen & trace here whatever shapes I happen to have in my head ... It is an exercise - training for eye & hand"... Read more >>
These essays are completely self-contained, and can be read for the pleasure which Virginia Woolf thought was the purpose of the essay form. But they also illuminate her larger works of fiction. They are a small proportion of her total output (which runs to five volumes) but they represent some of the most important themes which pervade her work as a whole. They are also amazingly prophetic - on women as writers, on the death of Empire, and on the speed and locomotion of modern life. She writes about the Tube, the telephone, the motor car, and aircraft, which were all recent developments. The essays are arranged in chronological order in four groups - reading and writing, biography, feminism, and contemporary culture. She had inherited the skill of writing from her father Leslie Stephen and by the time these essays were written had honed that skill into a high form of art... Read more >>
James Strachey was the younger brother of Lytton Strachey and one of the first people in England to train in and practise psychoanalysis. He translated Freud's work, and as a member of the Bloomsbury Group was instrumental in promoting it via publications with the Hogarth Press. These letters were written (almost daily) during the single long separation from his wife Alix who was being psychoanalysed as part of her training by Karl Abraham in Berlin. It's an interesting one-year slice of two lives which encompasses social and cultural life in Germany and the UK in the early 1920s, the foundations of Freudianism in the UK, and a rich tapestry of European modernism from two of its inside practitioners who were very keen to be au fait with the latest cultural and intellectual developments... Read more >>
Most people know about the strange personal relationships which existed amongst the Bloomsbury Group, of whom it was said that they were a "a circle of friends who lived in squares and loved in triangles." But many other people in the artistic and literary circles of the period 1910-1930 were making what might politely be called 'experiments in living', or less politely, 'having your cake and halfpenny as well'. Katy Roiphe takes six examples of marriages and partnerships which were tested almost to the limit. These people were consciously overthrowing the restraints they felt Victorian and Edwardian mores were placing upon personal liberty - particularly the right to have sex with whoever one chose... Read more >>
Andalusia is offering itself up in solar splendour at the moment - which is a welcome relief after the misery of Manchester in the last few weeks. And Puebla Lucia was at its finest - except that we have unfortunately lost another palm tree to the weevil infection which has blighted the coast recently.
My reading highlight was Katie Roiphe's much publicized Uncommon Arrangements - a study of six 'unusual' partnerships in the literary world of the 1920s. There's not a lot of in-depth analysis, but the gossip-factor rating is commendably high.
I followed this up with the Letters of James and Alix Strachey which made a sound case for their combined importance in establishing Freudianism in the UK, both as a medical practice and an intellectual force, via their translations of his work and publication via Leonard Woolf's Hogarth Press
I also slogged my way dutifully through two volumes on study skills for undergraduate and postgraduate students, then tackled a book of literary criticism on one of my old favourite authors, Vladimir Nabokov. Battling through it reminded me why nobody except geeks and academics seeking tenure would have the slightest interest in reading literary criticism in its latest manifestation.
Leonard Woolf was one of the longest living (1880-1976) and the most distinguished members of the Bloomsbury Group. He was a writer, a publisher, a political activist, a proto environmentalist and animal lover, a loyal friend, cantankerous employer, and a devoted husband.What's not so well known about him is that in fact he had two 'wives' - the second technically married to somebody else - who happened to be his business partner. This definitive selection from his voluminous correspondence begins at Cambridge, with letters to his lifelong friend Lytton Strachey, and fellow apostles G.E.Moore and Saxon Sydney-Turner. The manner of these early writings is surprisingly arch, full of classical references and undergraduate Weltschmerz - though no doubt this reflects the turn-of-the-century social mood amongst such a privileged elite... Read more
more BLOOMSBURY GROUP materials
Charleston is the country house in Lewes, Sussex which was established as a family home by Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant. She was married to Clive Bell at the time and had children by both men, but this was how things were done in the Bloomsbury Group. They lived in the house for over fifty years, covering the walls and furniture with their paintings, designing ceramics and furniture, making rugs and wall hangings, cultivating the gardens - and generally forming what became a unique collection of domestic and interior design. The house also became the country retreat for many of the Bloomsbury Group. Vanessa raised her children Julian, Quentin and Angelica there, and she was visited by her sister Virginia Woolf, as well as by her ex-lover Roger Fry, and at weekends her husband Clive Bell and his lover Mary Hutchinson... Read more >>
This is a beautifully illustrated book which explores the relationship between Bloomsbury notions of aesthetics and the actual interior designs of the homes in which its members lived. Christopher Reed takes their various houses as starting points - 46 Gordon Square, Asheham, Brunswick Square, Charleston, 52 Tavistock Square - for meditations on their socio-psychological development and the notions of art practised by Vanessa Bell, Walter Sickert, Roger Fry, and Duncan Grant. It should be said from the outset that although this has the size and has the high production values of a coffee table book, it is not a casual or an easy read. Christopher Reed situates Bloomsbury within theoretical concepts of art that were competing with each other in the early phase of European modernism in a serious and heavyweight fashion. And these theories themselves are analysed in a political and ideological manner. In fact his study is not only about Bloomsbury's domestic interiors... Read more >>
The Bloomsbury Group was largely composed of writers and intellectuals, but there were lots of artists and designers within their ranks too. This well illustrated guide focuses on the highpoint of their endeavours - the Omega Workshops which flourished in the period 1913—1919. It was the brainchild of Roger Fry, who recruited Vanessa Bell (his lover at the time) and Duncan Grant as co-directors for an opening in Fitzroy Square in 1913, deep in the heart of Bloomsbury. That was not an auspicious date for the debut of an enterprise which sought to bring Post-Impressionist design to the general public. But in fact it survived throughout the whole of the first world war, even though it was never commercially successful... Read more >>
This is a collection of memoirs, commentary, and criticism - all of which relate to the Bloomsbury Group and its members - of whom it was said that they were 'a circle of friends who lived in squares and loved in triangles'. Many of the materials are available elsewhere - people's letters, diaries, and various published papers; but these are scattered sources, whereas here they are all shepherded into one single pen, with the title 'Bloomsbury' writ large at the entrance. Characters reflect on each other - Virginia Woolf on her nephew Julian Bell, Duncan Grant on Virginia Woolf, Clive Bell on Roger Fry, David Garnett on E.M.Forster, and Leonard Woolf on his lifelong friend Lytton Strachey... Read more >>
Harold Nicolson was a diplomat, a writer, and a politician, but he is best known for being married to Vita Sackville-West. They were both fringe members of the Bloomsbury Group. She too was a writer - indeed a best-selling author in the 1930s - but is best known as the woman who fell in love with and ran away with Virginia Woolf. Collectively, she and her husband are also best known for their rather unusual marriage and its arrangements which permitted them both to have lovers of the same sex whilst swearing their undying loyalty to each other. All this is recorded by their son in the equally famous account Portrait of a Marriage ... Read more >>
This was the first extended study of Virginia Woolf's work to be written in English. It appeared in 1936, whilst she was still alive, shortly after the publication of her last major work, The Waves. The author Winifred Holtby was herself a novelist (best known for South Riding) a journalist, a radical feminist, and lifelong friend of Vera Britten, who wrote about their relationship in Testament of Friendship. Holtby takes what at the time was a fairly conventional approach to literary criticism, which was to read what was known of the author's biography into the fiction as a way of explaining it. Thus the parent figures in both The Voyage Out and To the Lighthouse are assumed to be portraits of Woolf's own mother and father; and the recurrence of sea imagery in her work is seen as simply a reflection of her childhood holidays in Cornwall... Read more >>
