This is a list of people associated with the Bloomsbury Group. Much about the group is controversial, including its membership: it has been said that "the three words 'the Bloomsbury group' have been so much used as to have become almost unusable".[1]
Group of friends and relatives that became a movement
The Bloomsbury group started as a loose collective of friends and relatives living near Bloomsbury in London. Some of them knew each other from their time as students in Cambridge. Around World War I most of its key members had left the Bloomsbury area, where some of them later returned.
The members of the Bloomsbury Group denied being a group in any formal sense, they however shared common values, among which was a strong belief in the arts.[2]
Generally not seen as members of the Bloomsbury Group
Died before the group really existed
Thoby Stephen, brother to key members Adrian Stephen, Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell
Omega Workshops
Roger Fry and other Bloomsbury Group artists such as Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant were involved in the Omega Workshops, a business which traded from 1913 to 1919. Other designers and manufacturers at the Workshops were not necessarily members of the Bloomsbury Group.
Hogarth Press was the publishing house owned by Leonard and Virginia Woolf after they had left the Bloomsbury area in 1917. Staff members and authors published by that company were not necessarily part of the Bloomsbury Group. The following are generally not seen as part of the Bloomsbury Group:
The Bloomsbury Group plays a prominent role in the LGBT history of its day. While still in the Bloomsbury area, LGBT activity was all very much in a single group (e.g. Duncan Grant, a homosexual with bisexual leanings,[8] having affairs with Maynard Keynes, James Strachey, Adrian Stephen, David Garnett and straight Vanessa Bell). Names of LGBT people outside the Bloomsbury Group strictly speaking include:
Later the groups differentiated. Keynes married Lopokova, and no longer belonged to any of the LGBT groups. Other groups more or less split according to the location of the members:
Lady Ottoline Morrell provided housing for Aldous Huxley at Garsington where he was married to Maria Nys after the war.
Also Duncan Grant and David Garnett had to work on the land as conscientious objectors during World War I. They started living with Vanessa Bell (also her sons Julian and Quentin) in Charleston Farmhouse:
Francis Birrell started a bookshop together with David Garnett later on.
Dora Carrington, Ralph Partridge and Lytton Stratchey at Ham Spray House
Also during the First World War, Lytton Strachey and Dora Carrington moved to Tidmarsh Mill House, Berkshire. Later (in a ménage à trois with straight Ralph Partridge) they moved to Ham Spray House, Wiltshire.
E. M. Forster spent his time as conscientious objector in Egypt, and remained there some time after the First World War. When returning to England his circle of LGBT friends and acquaintances included:
After Virginia Woolf had moved to Monk's House, East Sussex, she met Vita Sackville-West, writing her roman à clef Orlando: A Biography about her. Woolf also met the LGBT people around her, including:[9]
Ethel Smyth, another later acquaintance of Virginia Woolf [10]
Katherine Mansfield and John Lehmann, LGBT acquaintances linked to the publishing company she owned with her husband (Hogarth Press).
Others
Others not generally considered part of the Bloomsbury Group properly speaking (some of them only befriended individual group members, not or only partially sharing their views or not in the same creative mindset):
^Frances Spalding, Duncan Grant: A Biography. (1997) p. 169-170: (around 1915 Lawrence warned David Garnett against homosexual tendencies like those of Francis Birrell, Duncan Grant and Keynes:) "Lawrence's views, as Quentin Bell was the first to suggest and S. P. Rosenbaum has argued conclusively, were stirred by a dread of his own homosexual susceptibilities, which are revealed in his writings, notably the cancelled prologue to Women in Love".
