Bloomsbury Group - Membership

Membership

Much about Bloomsbury appears to be controversial, including its membership and name: indeed, some would maintain that "the three words 'the Bloomsbury group' have been so much used as to have become almost unusable". The group did not hold formal or informal discussions on particular topics, but talked about a range of topics at all times. Identifications of the membership of the circle have varied considerably depending on who drew up the lists, and when.

"Leonard Woolf, in the 1960s, listed as 'Old Bloomsbury' Vanessa and Clive Bell, Virginia and Leonard Woolf, Adrian and Karin Stephen, Lytton Strachey, Maynard Keynes, Duncan Grant, E. M. Forster, Saxon Sydney-Turner, Roger Fry, Desmond and Molly MacCarthy, with Julian, Quentin and Angelica Bell, and David Garnett as later additions". However, the claim has been made that (though factually accurate) Woolf's formulation is "a little too dogmatic and definite and contributes to the false view that Bloomsbury was an entity, almost a formal body", as opposed to "an informal group of friends, and nothing more".

Vanessa Bell and Virginia Woolf were sisters, and their brothers, the older Thoby and the younger Adrian, can also be considered original members of the group, (as were some other Cambridge figures - indeed, to some, "Bloomsbury was really Cambridge in London"). Lytton Strachey and Duncan Grant – later Vanessa’s partner – were cousins, so that a web of kinship, intellectual, social, sexual and amicable ties bound the group, while throughout the group’s history there were various (and complicated!) affairs among the individual members, most of whom lived for considerable periods of time in the West Central 1 district of London known as Bloomsbury.

An historical feature of these friends and relations is that their close relationships all predated their fame as writers, artists, and thinkers. Yet close friends, brothers, sisters, and even sometimes partners of the friends were not necessarily members of Bloomsbury: Keynes’s wife Lydia Lopokova was only reluctantly accepted into the group, and there were certainly "writers who were at some time close friends of Virginia Woolf, but who were distinctly not 'Bloomsbury': T. S. Eliot, Katherine Mansfield, Hugh Walpole". Members cited in "other lists might include Ottoline Morrell, or Dora Carrington, or James and Alix Strachey"; but even such a close associate as Virginia Woolf's long term lover Vita Sackville-West - "Vita would be the Hogarth Press's best-selling author" - belonged to a different literary grouping.