The Bloomsbury Group of influential British writers, intellectuals, philosophers and artists, whose most prominent members were Virginia and Leonard Woolf, Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant, E.M. Forster, Lytton Strachey, Maynard Keyes and Roger Fry, has starkly divided opinion ever since its lofty conversations filled the sitting rooms of Gordon Square and Fitzroy Square in the early years of the twentieth century.Despite a plethora of academic and reference works, studies of individual Bloomsburyites (most notably Virginia Woolf) and scholarly investigations of the group from almost every conceivable angle, accessible recent general histories of the group are thin on the ground.Matthew Dennison’s Talking, Loving, Writing, Painting fills this surprising lacuna with rigorous authority and considerable storytelling panache. He concentrates his narrative principally on the Stephen sisters and their husbands, Lytton Strachey, Duncan Grant, Roger Fry and John Maynard Keynes. Shifting deftly between these eight overlapping lives, and focusing particularly on the domestic and material surroundings of the group and on their literary, painterly and critical output. Matthew tells a tale of profound intellectual engagement, tangled emotional and sexual bonds, and a deep and lasting cultural legacy.Members of the group promoted modernism in literature and painting, rebellion against Victorian attitudes in politics, the law, church and military; pacifism, feminism, sexual permissiveness and toleration of homosexuality decades before it was legal. They exalted friendship above traditional family relationships and emphasised the inner life. Keynesian macroeconomics and its doctrine of state intervention informed the creators of the British welfare state.The Bloomsbury group continues to influence literary, aesthetic, critical and economic thinking and to colour attitudes towards feminism and sexuality. Matthew Dennison has written the definitive popular account of a cultural grouping that exerted a decisive impact on twentieth-century British culture and society.
