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

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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. All of which brings us to the question that kept coming up while reading Strachey’s book. There was something unbelievable about it. It’s hard to describe what caused disbelief, but I wanted to know what privileged or non-privileged others thought of the Bloomsbury set. These were the celebrated “Bright Young Things” about whom so many thought and wrote, yet they were as mentioned seemingly majority homosexual. Men and women. That’s what’s hard to believe. I don’t write the latter out of homophobia or anything of the sort. It’s more with wonder. Was London really this advanced in the 1920s whereby all the culture wars about sexuality that took place in the U.S. in between were leapfrogged? Again, questions. Were the homosexuals of that era at the top of the social heap as Strachey seems to allude, or truly outsiders for living as they did? And if outsiders, why did they shine so bright? Controversial before the First World War, the Bloomsbury Group became notorious in the 1920s. New members joined their ranks, pushing at boundaries, flouting conventions, and spurring their seniors to new heights of creative activity. Bloomsbury had always celebrated sexual equality and freedom in private, but this younger generation brought their transgressive lifestyles out into the open. Nino Strachey reveals a vivid history surprisingly relevant to our present day. 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?

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. Just as the original Bloomsbury Set (including Lytton Strachey and Virginia Woolf) had formed and caused societal stirs from the very start of the 20th century with their spirited approach to life, literature and culture - by the time the 1920s rolled around, a new era was blossoming (blooming? geddit?) in Bloomsbury, as a new generation and movement of youth stepped in to invigorate the already established Bloomsbury Group. This cohort still embraced art and creativity as their predecessors did, but brought new explorations of sexuality, gender norms, polyamory, and freedom of self-expression in all aspects of life. They pushed boundaries, turned heads and sparked discourse aplenty - and most importantly, revelled in it. They were queer, in every sense of the word, and proud.Finally, one factual error. Forster's Maurice was not unpublishable but rather Forster strictly forbade to be published until after he died. 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.

For now, the fact that homosexuality wasn’t a legal way of life had me wondering if memories of 100 years ago are grander than the life itself. Weren’t these individuals running scared? 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. The book concludes that the Bloomsbury's were the first to have non-conventional relationships, but that simply ignores pioneers such as Edward Carpenter. (Lived openly with George Merrill for 30 years and was very influential). Was the book unputdownable? That can’t be said, though it may well be unputdownable for those who know the world about which Strachey writes. The chapters were very short, which was great. The problem with the chapters for some will be that they read as gossipy streams of consciousness, and because they do, they don’t support Strachey’s contention that the “collective value” of the individuals she writes about “has been consistently underplayed.” The response here is that Strachey perhaps has a point, that these people were ahead of their time in their view that “every person had the right to live and love in the way they chose,” so why not focus more on their deep belief in freedom over the endless mentions of how Lytton Strachey, Dora Carrington, Stephen Tennant, et al personified polyamorous? 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.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. 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. 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.” Nino Strachey is an author and historian, with a special interest in hidden or underrepresented heritage. Her books Young Bloomsbury and Rooms of their Own shine new light on the queer history of the Bloomsbury Group, revealing changing attitudes towards gender and sexuality in the 1920s. Young Bloomsbury was published in the UK in May 2022 by John Murray Press, and in the US on 6th December 2022 by Atria Books. Please note: This review may not be reproduced or quoted, in whole or in part, without explicit consent from the author.

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: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. 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. 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.