Bloomsbury at Home

The Bloomsbury group is synonymous with artistic devotion and acerbic wit, liberal ideas and outrageous sexual frankness. But what was life like inside this famous circle?

From a distance of nearly one hundred years, it is difficult to imagine the restrictive and polite society in which Virginia Woolf and her sister Vanessa Bel were brought up. In breaking free, they and their close circle of friends determined to be true to art rather than convention, to give expression to their various loves, and to place good books above good housekeeping - a radical idea for women in early twentieth-century England.

Their fame - or notoriety - spread far beyond the gracious squares of Bloomsbury, the area of London where Virginia and Leonard Woolf, Mavnard Keynes, Clive Bel, and others had homes and that gave the group its name. Virginia and Leonard founded the Hogarth Presin Richmond (where it took over the house, even the pantry). Vanessa, with her lover, Duncan Grant, and his lover, David Garnett, rusticated in the wilder reaches of Suffolk during World War 1, then moved to Charleston, a run-down Sussex farmhouse that metamorphosed into an enchanted domain. At Lady Ottoline Morreil's estate, Garsington, at Lytton Strachey's and Dora Carrington's love nest beside the Thames at Tidmarsh, or even wintering in St. Tropez - wherever these unorthodox friends congregated, there was Bloomsbury.

Here, Pamela Todd re-creates life among the Bloomsbury group - their complicated and interlocking lives, their surprising successes and hilarious failures at interior decoration, their grand and elaborate parties and intimate moments. Using generous quotations from their diaries, letters, and recollections, and illustrating the text with their paintings, sketches, family photographs, and new photography of their homes and studios, Todd gives a fascinating perspective on Bloomsbury at home.
100 illustrations, including 80 plates in full colour.