Young Bloomsbury: the generation that reimagined love, freedom and self-expression

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Forster's Maurice was not unpublishable but rather Forster strictly forbade to be published until after he died. They pushed boundaries, turned heads and sparked discourse aplenty - and most importantly, revelled in it. I also thought this was quite uneven in its attention with more time spent on Julia Strachey and Stephen Tennant. I really enjoy reading about people who have led unconventional lives so I was excited to check this out.

I was surprised that she gave the young women such short shrift, though, after pages and pages of handsome Oxford and Cambridge men and their gay affairs. The best audience for this book is folks who are familiar with one or more of the famous figures and desire more information about how they lived. Unlike a lot of books about the Bloomsbury set, this particular book takes the bright young things—the next generation of Bloomsbury lovers, admirers and hangers-on—as its focus but, err, given the way the roaring twenties went they’re all androgynously beautiful twenty-somethings who went to Oxford and potentially had mental health issues. Further disclaimer: Readers, please stop accusing me of trying to take down “my competition” because I wrote a review you didn’t like. A hundred years ahead of their time, these creative souls were pushing the boundaries of gender identity and sexual expression, and - surprisingly - finding acceptance among their friends and families.That attitudes have changed is good and I’m not so stupid as to go on an anti ‘woke’ rant, no, my objection is the anachronistic one. Written, of course, by a member of the Strachey family who had access to privately-held documents from family and friends, Nino Strachey brings some more obscure figures into the light of day while also presenting the more familiar figures such as Virginia and Leonard Woolf, Lytton Stratchey, Duncan Grant, Vanessa Bell, E. 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.

Having read this, I feel it will be of more interest to those who haven’t, perhaps, read as many books about the Bloomsbury group as I have. As such, I ended the book feeling as though I had eaten an insubstantial meal and was left, casting around, feeling rather unsatisfied. If you've read about the Bloomsberries before then this book over-promises and doesn't wholly deliver on its premise. My favourite passage was probably this: 'A family of choice, they created ties of love that lasted a lifetime, embracing queerness, acknowledging difference, defying traditional moral codes.

Not because it was poorly narrated, but because there are so many names and connections and relationships that I so often lost track and wished I could flip back, or tab or highlight sections. Nino Strachey is the last member of the Strachey family to have grown up at Sutton Court in Somerset, home of the family for more than three hundred years.