Young Bloomsbury: The Generation That Redefined Love, Freedom, and Self-Expression in 1920s England

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I think I’m also a fairly shallow audience when it comes to biography: like Virginia Woolf I’m all about gossip, love affairs, and intimate emotional portraits. And I realise that’s complex because we’re talking about real people who lived real lives and it’s not really my business what they liked to do in bed. Even putting my sordid tastes, though, there’s just so much … vividity to the lives of these people, like when Clive Duncan gets so pissed off at Lytton Strachey he decides to “fire” him as a friend and writes a long letter that he doesn’t, in the end send: All of which speaks to a level of seriousness in the notables featured in Young Bloomsbury that the book perhaps did not vivify. Strachey makes it more than plain to readers that the Bloomsbury atmosphere was such that you could “say what you liked about sex, art or religion,” and the impression is given of people who are maybe flighty. Which didn’t read right. Even if all of “Young Bloomsbury” hadn’t seen the war, all of this crowd surely knew people very well who had. Men or women regardless of age had seen enormous trouble. How could they not have? It’s a way of suggesting that these were individuals who had much more than “sex, art or religion” on their minds. What was it? And let’s not answer with they were merely trying to forget. What’s awful can’t be forgotten, so what was on their minds when they weren’t “buggering” everything within eyesight? I found this book disappointing. Like other reviewers here, I had expected that, with the author being a member of the Strachey family, there would be new information and the concept of a second generation of "Bloomsberries" was interesting. Group biographies are a difficult genre to pull off without a very clear central theme which enables the author to deal with chronological complexity and avoid repetition - Francesca Wade's Square Haunting is a good example of a successful group biography. But this book seemed jumbled, repetitive and superficial, with no real sense of the personalities or the milieux in which they existed. And the constant emphasis on the group's sexual exploits was tedious. Again, none of this is meant as criticism of these people. As a believer once again that libertarianism is the perfect ideology for it being all about freedom to choose, it’s hard not to be drawn to historical figures whose motto was there “was nothing one could not say, nothing that one could not do.” This is how it should be. It’s just that it seems easier to be as one should be when privileged.

They once again believed deeply, but they also could believe deeply in what at times rejected societal norms. Author Strachey notes that Lytton, after having been denied objector status for WWI, showed up to the draft tribunal and offered “to interpose his body between his sister and the German if a soldier attempted to rape her.” He “was then rejected on grounds of ill health.” About this story, it’s possible I read it wrong, but as I see it only a well-born type could have and would have so blatantly revealed his sexual orientation in this way in the first fifth of the 1900s.You walk in an alley sheltered and comely … your hedges are grown so tall that you know nothing of the sun, save that he falls sometimes perpendicular on your vanity and warms your self-complacency at noon.”

Essentially this is a group who, despite their blatant privileges and lust for the finer things in life, ultimately chose to campaign for a fairer future, and liberation for all - even at the disinclination of their family and many peers. It’s very reminiscent of many things I have seen in this generation (though we are generally minus the wealthy parents and class protection also) As does your reviewer’s assertion that ideologically perfect as libertarianism is, it has elitist, class privileged qualities. Strachey’s book seems to support this view in that the crowd she writes about reads as very libertarian, not to mention that it succeeded by virtue of it “reaching an audience eager to challenge traditional conventions.” The “Bloomsberries” were very much of the belief that “every person had the right to live and love in the way they chose.” Ok, so how to say this? Libertarianism of the small l variety is correct, but it also appeals to an elite that not only believes in freedom to live and let live, but that also can live and let live.The Bloomsbury Group was renowned for its wit, and this is completely devoid of it. This provides a thumbnail sketch of the group and the young ones that came along. Given the author's relationship to the group one can't expect that this will be a balanced view, and that is especially revealed when she writes about John Strachey. Nino enjoys exploring the relationships between people and place, seeing buildings as biography. She has written a chapter on a 19th century female collector for a book on Jewish Country Houses, and has published articles in the Wall Street Journal, Apollo, the Literary Review and Country Life. She loves connecting directly with audiences, and over the last few years has appeared at the Cheltenham, Bath, Edinburgh, Blenheim, Dartington and Charleston Literary Festivals (to name just a few). She has lectured on Bloomsbury in America and Italy, and at museums, universities and historic houses in the UK. The central core of this book is the relationship between the two Bloomsbury generations: the way the elders created a space for acceptance, self-expression, and queerness that allowed the young generation to flourish, and in turn, the younger generation provided novelty and creativity and, y’know, their nubile twenty-something bodies for bonking. In all seriousness, the environment cultivated by the elder Bloomsburys does seem to have been genuinely beneficial—radical, too, in its gender equality (class less so, however, something this book gently elides) and sexual openness, especially in contrast to the repression of the times. And the book itself does its best to honour the queerness of its subjects: there’s frank discussion of polyamory and pansexuality, as well as expressions of gender nonconformity that we might today recognise as reflections of trans or nonbinary identity.

An “illuminating” ( Daily Mail , London) exploration of the second generation of the iconic Bloomsbury Group who inspired their elders to new heights of creativity and passion while also pushing the boundaries of sexual freedom and gender norms in 1920s England.Unfortunately, my knowledge and interest in art is so minuscule as to have been detrimental in my understanding of several Bloomsbury figures. I shall educate myself forthwith. Maybe there’s much less of a book without it, but the chapters go from conquest to conquest. This will perhaps excite some, bother others, and bring on indifference in still others. At the same time, there’s an argument that what Strachey reports has useful significance about the present. Indeed, while reading Young Bloomsbury I found myself wishing those on the hunt to ruin existing lives for how some acted in the past would read Strachey’s book. To do so would be to see that those who were part of “Young Bloomsbury” were seemingly all sexual predators. Keynes, whom Strachey describes as “one of the wealthier hosts in Bloomsbury,” “used his position” to “befriend and seduce undergraduates.” It all reads as normal until we see individuals in the here and now losing their careers for doing in the past what so many did. One guesses that Keynes’s predatory ways with younger males was an open secret. Right or wrong, at the time it was seemingly viewed as normal within this elite world. And it’s something to think about as we apply present-day morals to what happened in the past. Eventually what George Will describes as “presentism” will get us all. Gender fluidity? Pansexuality? Throuples? Chosen families? Cross-dressing? Kinks? Young Bloomsbury explores a place and time when queer life blossomed’ Washington Post

It should be a crime to write a book this dull about a group of writers, artists, and intellectuals who sussed vibrancy out of every moment. I have a feeling Lytton Strachey, Virginia Woolf, Duncan Grant and all the other members of the Bloomsbury milieu are spinning in their graves right about now. Anyone who endeavors to write a book that probes the loves and losses of the Bloomsbury group needs to up their game and provide a text as fresh and original as they were, yet Young Bloomsbury is full of yawns when it should be raucous and trenchant. Either Nino Strachey--a relative?--was too close her subjects or not close enough. Reading this was a pretty fun time. Any book in which the central cohort describe themselves as ‘very gay and amorous’ is going to be a winner for me tbh, and this was no exception. Interestingly, the only negative, and dare I say bitchy, comments all come via quotes attributed to Virginia Woolf, which unfortunately lead me to believe the author is clearly not a fan. This book is an absolute delight! I had some familiarity with the Bloomsbury group (Virginia Woolf, Cecil Beaton, Duncan Grant, Lytton Strachey, Evelyn Waugh etc.) but this book goes into much more detail about their lives, loves, ability to express themselves freely and be open to all sexual orientations and gender expression. This was a creative and fantastic time and these writers, artists and critics opened up new perspectives and visions that have only recently in the past few decades or so been "revived" of sorts in the US and UK in particular. What makes this book so unique and special is that the author is a descendant of one of the main members of the group and so tells us a compelling narrative that connects into present day and to their child. The book is structured really well -- each chapter focuses on one aspect of culture or their lives. This is a highly informative and enjoyable read. I highly recommend it.

Table of Contents

In the years before the First World War, a collection of writers and artists—Virginia Woolf, E.M. Forster, and Lytton Strachey among them—began to make a name for themselves in England and America for their irreverent spirit and provocative works of literature, art, and criticism. They called themselves the Bloomsbury Group and by the 1920s, they were at the height of their influence.