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Many years ago I got interested in the novels of Virginia Woolf. I set about trying to understand what she was writing about in her highly revolutionary style and who she was. In the process of that I discovered the Bloomsbury Group of which she was a founding member. I have spent the past 30 years exploring the work and lives of a group of very interesting people. A number of them made enduring artistic, literary and intellectual contributions. That alone makes them interesting. For my personal interest there was another facet of interest. They were a rarity in an age when being gay or lesbian was still the love that dare not speak its name. A substantial portion of the group were gay and or bisexual. They managed to explore their sexual and romantic inclinations despite the world that they lived in and they left a large body of documentation about those relationships. The great problem in putting together the picture of gay history is that there is so little hard evidence of the details of life of people whose lives and liberty depended on secrecy.
The Bloomsbury Group came into existence when the four children of Leslie Stephen picked up and moved to a house at 50 Gordon Sq in the Bloomsbury district of London, following his death in 1904. The University of London is located in the area giving it something of a bohemian flavor and the rents are a lot cheaper than Belgravia. The Stephen clan consisted of the oldest brother Thoby, sisters Vanessa and Virginia and the youngest brother Adrian. They came from a legacy of English intelligentsia both from the Stephen family and their mother Julia Prinsep. This is what the area looks like today.
This is the plaque that is on the house where the Stephen family set up shop.
In 2002 I went to London and made a point of staying at a bed and breakfast in Bloomsbury and had a marvelous time soaking up the atmosphere.
Thoby Stephen had just come down from Cambridge where he was a member of The Apostles, a secret intellectual discussion group that met of Saturday nights. He invited several of his fellow Apostles who were also recent graduates to hold similar weekly meetings at Gordon Sq. In what was an unusual move for the times, He included his sisters in the group. Both of the Stephen sisters married men who were members of the initial group. Vanessa who was a painter married Clive Bell and Virginia married Leonard Woolf. I am going to focus on the four initial members who were gay or lesbian. All four of them had very prominent careers as writers. Three of them are still well known to day. They are:
John Maynard Keynes, economist
Lytton Strachey, biographer
Virginia Woolf, novelist
Edward Morgan Forster, novelist
The portraits that I am using here were all painted by Bloomsbury painters. It was all very incestuous in many ways.
Maynard Keynes was a prodigy who sailed through the elite educational institutions of Eton and Cambridge. His sexual orientation was pretty much exclusively gay, but late in life he married a Russian ballerina Lydia Lopokova. Maynard and Lytton Strachey were both Apostles at Cambridge and very close friends. The friendship came under great stress when they became rivals for the affections of Duncan Grant, Lytton's cousin and a painter who became an integral part of Bloomsbury. Maynard got Duncan and Lytton never really forgave him for it. Duncan eventually tired of domesticity with Maynard and went off on adventures. Never the less they remained close friends until Maynard's death. The portrait of Maynard was painted by Duncan.
Maynard wrote a bunch of books about economics. There was a period when his theories of economic management were the dominant influence in most western nations. He is still considered to be one of the world's most important economist.
Lytton Strachey was outrageously campy, very bright and possessed of an acid tongue. He wrote very popular biographies which sold well in his day. They are not widely known today. His first book
Eminent Victorians undertook the fracturing of four of the major icons of Victorian propriety. One of his targets was Florence Nightingale. It created a major controversy and had fantastic sales. He and Virginia Woolf conducted an extensive correspondence. It has been collected and published in part because it sets an historical standard for brilliantly clever dissecting gossip.
The portrait of Lytton was painted by Dora Carrington. As a young woman she fell madly in love with him. While the sexual attraction wasn't reciprocated, he held her in affection and they lived as part of the same household. Upon his death she committed suicide.
Morgan Forster was a basically shy man who generally looked at the world as something of an outsider. I think that being gay was a significant element in this facet of his personality. While he was an Apostle at Cambridge and an original member of the Bloomsbury discussion group, his life was not closely bound up with the other members. He remained a detached outsider and I find that reflected in his writing. He had completed all of his novels published in his lifetime before WW I. They deal with issues of cultural differences with mostly an understated and wry tone. It is only in
Howards End that he begins to deal with tragic consequences of the excluded outsider and issues of class discrimination.
During WW I he spent time in Egypt doing war relief work. He had a flirtation with an Egyptian bus conductor. Later he spent time in India as the private secretary of a maharajah. He returned to England from that experience with his teeth sunk into the issues of culture, race, class and imperialism. He used that grasp to write his masterpiece, A Passage to India. If Forster had stopped with Howards End he would probably be remembered, if at all, as a skilled novelist of the Edwardian period. A Passage To India is clearly the book that gave him his place in literary history.
Forester undertook to write a novel that deals explicitly with the exclusion of a gay man by English society, Maurice. He wrote from his own need for personal expression and to share with a very limited circle of trusted friends. He was not writing for a public audience. As such it does not rise to the literary level of his best work. Never the less it was a significant step in the history of gay literature. It was published posthumously in 1971. Merchant Ivory Productions made a first rate film of it in 1987. They made some major revisions to it in order to make it accessible to a contemporary audience that lives in a world in which homosexuality has become less of an absolute taboo. This in a case, IMO where the film is an improvement on the book. He also wrote some short stories with gay themes and references. They were published posthumously in the collection The Life to Come and Other Stories.
Late in his life Morgan formed a close attachment to a policeman named Bob Buckingham who was married with a son. The nature of the relationship is somewhat ambiguous. Morgan eventually also became close to Bob's wife Mae and essentially became part of their family. He spent his last days with them. The portrait of Morgan was painted by Roger Fry who was a very prominent art scholar and a later addition to the Bloomsbury group. He and Vanessa Bell had an extended affair.
Virginia Woolf really qualified as a literary genius. She had a particularly individual intelligence that enabled her to blaze new paths in literary style and technique as well as creativity. She also battled a life long mental illness which ultimately led to her suicide. The illness and her fear of it had a clear impact on her writing. It appears to have been an intermittently recurring state that would likely be described as a bipolar disorder in today's terminology. Both her father and his father suffered from chronic depressive disorders. It is difficult to get a clear handle on the exact nature of the condition. During her periods of madness as she referred to them, most of her communication with the outside world ceased. Her diaries and correspondence fall silent. Neither she nor the people who were close to her left much in the way of descriptions of her behavior and symptoms. One aspect was hearing voices. It was the return of those voices that finally sent over the edge.
The portrait of Virginia was painted by her sister Vanessa.
After I got interested in her and her writing, I set myself the task of reading everything that she ever wrote. That was a pretty tall order because as a result of the great interest in her writing, just about every word that she ever put on paper has been published. I made it through the novels, the short stories, the correspondence, the diaries and was well into the essays before I finally ran out of steam. I gave up on the large body of literary criticism that she published anonymously in The Times Literary Supplement primarily as a means of making a living. While always competent, they were often less than inspired.
The Waves and To The Lighthouse are Virginia's two masterpieces. Mrs Dalloway and The Years are also first rate novels. The Waves is a highly experimental and unconventional work in its form and approach. Reading it constitutes a major intellectual challenge. It can be described as a fractured unitary conscientiousness conveyed by the speeches of multiple characters and a narrator. To The Lighthouse is modernist in the tradition of Proust and Joyce. Reading it is not as daunting as The Waves but it is most definitely not a page turner. It needs to be absorbed on multiple levels. It gives me the sense that every single word was carefully chosen to blend into the whole in something like the way that one would create a piece of jewelry.
Virginia was a lesbian. Her marriage to Leonard Woolf was probably without sex. He was advised by her doctors that sex and child birth could plunge her into a major psychological crisis. Never the less they had an enduring, effective and supportive partnership. The founded and jointly operated the Hogarth Press. It published most of Virginia's works as well as other distinguished and avant guard authors.
Virginia's one known sexual relationship was with the aristocratic and flamboyant lesbian author
Vita Sackville-West. Vita's life with her husband the gay author Harold Nicholson reads like a novel. Her son Nigel and grandson Adam have gotten considerable literary mileage out of telling the family secrets. Virginia and Vita's sexual relationship was of limited duration but their friendship endured for sometime after it.
The relationship with Vita was the inspiration for one of Virginia's explorations into issues of gender and feminism, Orlando: A Biography. It is a very fanciful account of a character who begins life as a man in Russia and over the course of a life that has lasted for over 300 years becomes a woman. The book includes photographs of Vita and is dedicated to her. On its publication Virginia and Leonard arrived at Sissinghurst Castle to present the orinigal manuscript to Vita. It is difficult to characterize it as a specifically gay novel, but it was clearly meddling with all manner of sexual and gender taboos.
Vita and Ethel Smyth a well known composer with whom Virginia became friends later in her life were women with a clearly developed lesbian identity and for the times they weren't shy in talking about it. My sense is that being a lesbian was not such a clear focus in Virginia's personal identity, but she was miles ahead of her times in being a feminist. I think that for her the two identities were blended and feminism was something that she could write about openly and explicitly. She did it in two of her important non-fiction works A Room of One's Own and Three Guineas. I have found both books excellent and it is surprising as well as depressing have contemporary they remain in their analysis. There have been two generations of male literary critics who have gone tish tish over what a shame that she wasted her talent on such peripheral and unimportant matters.
In 1941 Virginia was increasingly overcome by the stress of the war with the constant threat of bombing attacks. She began to enter into another episode of psychotic depression and the return of the voices which rendered her unable to concentrate on writing. After writing tastefully composed suicide notes to both Leonard and Vanessa she went out for a walk in Rodmell where they were living in their cottage Monk's House. She put a rock into her pocket to weight her down and walked into the River Ouse where she drowned.
I hope that you have enjoyed what for me is a very brief visit to the world of Bloomsbury and some of the wonderful and fascinating people that I have met there. Their lives and their work have greatly enriched my experience and I am deeply in their debt for it.
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