S.P. Rosenbaum – författare

A study of the literary history of the interrelated achievements of the Bloomsbury Group. Professor Rosenbaum has written an account of the ideas and people who were the early influences on the Group. He sees the modern period not as the age of 'great men', but in a new light, where original ideas about art, women and society.

This first of a three-volume study of the early literary history of the Bloomsbury Group describes the intellectual, family and Cambridge backgrounds of Bloomsbury as they are reflected in the Group's early or autobiographical works, covering not only Virginia Woolf, E.M. Forster and Lytton Strachey, but also Leonard Woolf, John Maynard Keynes, Roger Fry, Clive Bell, Desmond MacCarthy and others. The book is a comprehensive study of the literary history of their interrelated achievements. It is also an account of the ideas and people who were the early influences on the Bloomsbury Group. It sees the modern period, not as the age of "great men", but in a new light, where original ideas about art, women and society, as they affected and continue to affect - writing, painting, thought, politics, had their beginning. S.P. Rosenbaum is the editor of "A Bloomsbury Group Reader", "Virginia Woolf's Women & Fiction: The Manuscript Versions of 'A Room of One's Own'" and "The Bloomsbury Group: A Collection of Memoirs, Commentary and Criticism".

Bloomsbury, wrote E.M. Forster in 1929, 'is the only genuine movement in English civilization.' By this time the group's influence had been extended from fiction, biography, economics, and painting through literary, social, and art criticism to publishing and journalism. Partly as a result of its influence, Bloomsbury has been widely misunderstood as a cultural, social, and even sexual phenomenon by both its friends and its detractors. As S.P. Rosenbaum observes in the foreword to this revised and expanded edition, Bloomsbury cannot be reduced to a creed or argued away because of its complexity. 'What Bloomsbury stood for is what they were and what they did,' he writes, 'That is why a collection of descriptions of the Bloomsbury's lives and works may be the only wholly satisfactory way of defining the Bloomsbury Group.'The first section of the volume, Bloomsbury on Bloomsbury, contains the basic memoirs and discussions of the Group itself by the original members, Virginia and Leonard Woolf, Vanessa and Clive Bell, E.M. Forster, Roger Fry, John Maynard Keynes, Lytton Strachey, Duncan Grant, Desmond MacCarthy, and others. These recollections range from unpublished private correspondence and diaries to formal autobiographies. Published here for the first time is the remainder of Desmond MacCarthy's unfinished Bloomsbury memoir. Virginia Woolf's complete Memoir Club paper on Old Bloomsbury and excerpts from her letters and diaries also appear, as do letters about Bloomsbury by Lytton Strachey, Roger Fry, E.M. Forster, and Vanessa Bell. The second section, Bloomsberries, contains observations on individuals by other members of the group and their children. Virginia Woolf's hitherto unknown biographical fantasy on J.M. Keynes is newly added, as are accounts of Molly MacCarthy, Lydia Lopokova, and David Garnett. Bloomsbury Observed, the last section, consists of reminiscences of the group mainly by their contemporaries. Additions to the revised edition include an early anonymous newspaper account of Bloomsbury, and observations by Quentin Bell, Beatrice Webb, Gerald Brenan, Christopher Isherwood, Frances Partridge, and others. Also included are an updated chronology recording the principal events in the careers of Bloomsbury's members and an enlarged bibliography.