Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

This expression has long been used to denote an informal nexus of aesthetes and I ntellectuals influential, or at least conspicuous, in the first half of this century, and still, on account of their unconventional opinions and (especially) sex lives, of apparently inexhaustible interest to popular biographers. The name derives from the removal, on the death of the Victorian man of letters and first editor of the Dictionary of National Biography Sir Leslie Stephen (1832–1904), of his four children, who included the painter Vanessa (Bell) and the novelist Virginia (Woolf), from Hyde Park Gate to 46, Gordon Square, in the then highly unfashionable Bloomsbury district of central London. Here they and their friends met for regular soirées and discussions, and a nucleus of like-minded people evolved which long survived the break-up of the original household. The group never had any official identity, though many of its members had belonged to Cambridge University's elite Society of Apostles. The Bloomsbury group, in fact, was almost exclusively Cambridge-educated and (later) Cambridge-based: it included the philosophers G. E. Moore and (peripherally) Bertrand Russell (both Trinity College), the historian G. Lowes Dickinson, the art critic Roger Fry, the biographer and literary critic Lytton Strachey, the novelist E. M. Forster, and the economist J. M. Keynes (all graduates or Fellows ... log in or subscribe to read full text