Bloomsbury Group - Posthumous Bloomsbury

Posthumous Bloomsbury

The Memoir Club continued meeting intermittently until Clive Bell’s death in 1964. Younger members of the group and the club included the writer David Garnett, and later his wife Angelica Garnett, the daughter of Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant. Her half-brother the artist and writer Quentin Bell eventually became the club’s secretary, and later wrote his aunt’s biography. Sister and brother wrote very different memoirs about Bloomsbury, Angelica’s being Deceived by Kindness (1984) and Quentin’s Elders and Betters (1995). Among other younger members were Lytton’s niece the writer Julia Strachey, and the diarist Frances Partridge who had married into Lytton Strachey’s ménage in the 1930s.

Following Virginia’s death Leonard Woolf began editing collections of her writings including a selection from her diaries, A Writer’s Diary (1953), which revealed publicly for the first time what the Bloomsbury Group had been like. Leonard’s own volumes of autobiography in the 1960s (he died in 1969) gave the fullest account, but he remained reticent about the sexual lives of the members, as had the excerpts from Virginia’s diary. Subsequent biographies of Strachey then Virginia Woolf, Forster, Keynes, Fry, Vanessa Bell, and Grant removed all veils. Indeed much of the interest in Bloomsbury has been biographically driven, yet it is their achievements as writers, artists, and thinkers that have ultimately made their lives biographically interesting. The case of Virginia Woolf provides an example. There have now been more than half a dozen biographies of her, yet a good deal of the basic scholarship of locating and editing her work remains unfinished; significant unpublished writings of hers are still being found in library archives.

The Bloomsbury Group has featured in many works of fiction, including, notably, Michael Cunningham's The Hours and Susan Sellers' Vanessa and Virginia.