Overview
Celebrated and maligned with equal vigor, the Bloomsbury Group is the best-documented artistic coterie in twentieth-century literature. The novelists Virginia Woolf and E. M. Forster, the artists Roger Fry, Duncan Grant, and Vanessa Bell, and the economist John Maynard Keynes were among this charmed circle that emerged in London before the First World War and came to exercise a complex, lingering influence on English art and letters. Theirs was a world of great talent - even genius - sexual intrigue, and gossip; they cultivated an atmosphere in which it was possible to say anything, do anything. Their peak of influence in the 1920s was followed by forty years of sustained sidelong derogation, and occasional frontal attack, from such famously hostile critics as D. H. Lawrence and Wyndham Lewis, until, in the 1960s, the idea of Bloomsbury exploded in the public imagination, transforming the Group into an almost mass-market attraction. Not in their darkest nightmares could Bloomsbury's contemporary detractors have imagined that Charleston Farmhouse, where Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant once lived and painted, would eventually attract some 15,000 visitors each year, or that a high-profile film, Carrington, would be based on Lytton Strachey's largely platonic love affair with an obscure artist on the fringes of the hallowed Group. Bloomsbury Pie examines the persistent allure of Bloomsbury - a fascination driven by nostalgia, adoration, and antipathy - and tracks the resurgence of interest in the Group, from a handful of biographies in the 1960s through the feminist discovery of Virginia Woolf in the 1970s and the enshrinement of the Bloomsberries as cultural icons in the 1980s and 1990s. Drawing on a wealth of material generated by this revival, Regina Marler chronicles the story of the Bloomsbury boom - its scholars, collectors, and fanatics - and explores the industry it has spawned among writers, publishers, and art dealers. In the process she creates an impressiEditorials
Publishers Weekly -
"[B]roadcasts, exhibitions, journalism, symposia, postcards, scholarly essays, sharp exchanges in `Letters' sections, midnight readings of The Waves, the first Virginia Woolf teacup, the first exhibition of Carrington's art" are among the ephemera that fuel the "nostalgia, adoration, and antipathy" of what Marler, in this meticulously and lovingly researched book, labels the Bloomsbury boom. How, Marler asks, did "Bloomsbury" evolve from a private joke describing the group of artists, critics and writers surrounding Virginia and Leonard Woolf in 1920s and '30s England into a cultural phenomenon? More importantly, why has the Bloomsbury Group always inspired such "fierce emotion" and how has the booming Bloomsbury industry fueled such passions? Starting with Leonard Woolf ("the bridge between Bloomsbury itself...and what would become the Bloomsbury industry"), Marler looks at the array of writing that stripped away the group's secrets and clothed it in mythoften simultaneously. Marler sees the boom starting in the early 1970s and continuing on with the various members being recast as exemplars of feminism or homosexuality. A journalist who edited Vanessa Bell's letters, Marler brings Bloomsbury to accessible and vivid life by quoting liberally from magazines, newspapers and books to capture such heated debates as those between pro- and anti-Bloomsbury factions or American feminists and British scholars. Most compelling is her examination of how the ever-shifting interpretations of the Bloomsbury texts reveal what Marler calls "the almost infinite malleability of documentary evidence." (Sept.) FYI: The following books from the past several months show the bloom's not off yet: Hermione Lee's Virginia Woolf (Knopf); Panthea Reid's Art and Affectation: A Life of Virginia Woolf (Oxford); Quentin Bell's upcoming Charleston: A Bloomsbury House and Garden (Holt); Peter Stansky's On or About December 1910 (Harvard).Booknews
Celebrated and maligned with equal vigor, the Bloomsbury Group is the best-documented artistic coterie in 20th century literature. This volume examines Bloomsbury's persistent allure and tracks the resurgence of interest in them, from a handful of biographies in the 1960s to the public's mass veneration of their virtually enshrined former homes and gardens in the 1990s. 6x8<">. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.Kirkus Reviews
This lively volume recounts the outpouring of masses of paper devoted to what one chronicler later described as, alternatively, "a point of view, a period, a gang of conspirators, or an infectious disease."Whatever Bloomsbury was, whether Clive Bell's "shrine of civilization" or D.H. Lawrence's nest of "black beetles," it is now an industry—literary, scholarly, artistic, and cultural. Marler, the editor of the Selected Letters of Vanessa Bell (1993), is part of this industry, but she views its history of sensational biographic revelations, disputed literary estates, and academic squabbles with equanimity and wit. Michael Holroyd's groundbreakingly frank biography of Lytton Strachey (196768) usually gets much of the credit for the Bloomsbury revival after F.R. Leavis's scorn in Scrutiny and the art world's dismissal. Marler gives an entertaining account of Holroyd's determined efforts to penetrate the circle of surviving Bloomsberries after receiving only a £50 advance from his reluctant publisher. She also examines more deliberate strategies of keeping Bloomsbury on the cultural map. Leonard Woolf continued publishing his wife's writings after her death, always fighting to keep her work available. The shrewd London art dealer Anthony d'Offay stepped in during the declining years of Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell and, with assistance from several of Grant's protégés, profited handsomely while marketing his work. Quentin Bell, Virginia Woolf's nephew and first biographer, became the tactful keeper of the Bloomsbury flame, even as American feminists started to present a radical version of his aunt in the 1970s. Marler is particularly sharp on transatlantic differences in the Bloomsbury boom, illuminating the British domestication of the unconventional coterie vs. its American academization in the MLA and assorted archives.
A tart but flavorsome recipe for the preserves of Bloomsberries in what Marler accurately describes as "a tenacious and unwieldy cultural phenomenon."