Bloomsbury Group

This article is about the historic literary group. For the contemporary publishing company, see Bloomsbury Publishing.
"Bloomsbury Set" redirects here. For the 1980s pop group, see Bloomsbury Set (band).

46 Gordon Square, Bloomsbury, London. The economist John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946) lived here from 1916.

The Bloomsbury Group or Bloomsbury Set was a group of associated English writers, intellectuals, philosophers and artists in the early 20th century.[1] Among the people involved in the group were Virginia Woolf, John Maynard Keynes, E. M. Forster, Vanessa Bell, and Lytton Strachey. Their works and outlook deeply influenced literature, aesthetics, criticism, and economics, as well as modern attitudes towards feminism, pacifism, and sexuality.[2]

Although popularly thought of as a formal group, it was a loose collective of friends and relatives closely associated with the University of Cambridge for the men and King's College London for the women, who at one point lived, worked or studied together near Bloomsbury, London. According to Ian Ousby, "although its members denied being a group in any formal sense, they were united by an abiding belief in the importance of the arts."[3] The historian C. J. Coventry, resurrecting an older argument by Raymond Williams, disputes the existence of the group and the extent of its impact, describing it as "curio" for those interested in Keynes and Woolf.[4][5]

  1. ^ Fargis, p. 262
  2. ^ The Bloomsbury Group: Artists, Writers & Thinkers Archived 25 November 2010 at the Wayback Machine
  3. ^ Ousby, p. 95
  4. ^ Coventry, C. J. (January 2023). Keynes From Below: A Social History of Second World War Keynesian Economics (PhD thesis). Federation University Australia.
  5. ^ Raymond Williams, “The Significance of ‘Bloomsbury’ as a Social and Cultural Group,” in Derek Crabtree & A. P. Thirlwall, Keynes and the Bloomsbury Group: The Fourth Keynes Seminar held at the University of Kent at Canterbury (Macmillan, 1980).