A Bloomsbury Group Reader

Because whenever they wrote the members of Bloomsbury tried to write well, there is an abundant variety of illuminating and delightful reading to be found in the short prose works of the Group's novelists, biographers, critics, and even political economists. In A Bloomsbury Group Reader Professor Rosenbaum offers a representative selection of such writings by Virginia Woolf, E. M. Forster, Lytton Strachey, Roger Fry, Desmond MacCarthy, Clive Bell, Leonard Woolf, John Maynard Keynes, and Vanessa Bell. His focus in this selection is not upon the lives of the Group but upon what finally must justify our interest in them: their work, in this instance, as writers. Part I: Forewords:.

Virginia Woolf: The Common Reader.

Lytton Strachey: Preface to Eminent Victorians.

Roger Fry: Introduction to A Sampler of Castille.

E. M. Forster: Introduction to Collected Short Stories.

Part II: Stories:.

E. M. Forster: The Point of It.

Leonard Woolf: Pearls and Swine.

Virginia Woolf: Mrs. Dalloway in Bond Street.

Part III: Biographies:.

E. M. Forster: The Emperor Babur.

Lytton Strachey: Madame de Sevigne's Cousin.

Desmond MacCarthy: Disraeli.

Virginia Woolf: Julia Margaret Cameron.

Leonard Woolf: Herbert Spencer.

John Maynard Keynes: Mr. Lloyd George.

Part IV: Essays:.

Lytton Strachey: A Victorian Critic.

Desmond MacCarthy: The Post- Impressionists.

Roger Fry: Art and Socialism.

Clive Bell: The Artistic Problem.

Leonard Woolf: Fear and Politics.

John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren.

Virginia Woolf: Memories of a Working Women's Guild.

E. M. Forster: What I Believe.

Part V: Talks:.

Lytton Strachey: Art and Indecency.

Virginia Woolf: Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown.

Roger Fry: Impressionism.

J. M. Keynes: On Reading Books.

E. M. Forster: English Prose between 1918 and 1939.

Part VI: Reviews: .

Clive Bell: Ibsen.

Lytton Strachey: Mr Hardy's New Poems.

Desmond McCarthy: The New St. Bernard.

Leonard Woolf: Freud's Psychopathology of Everyday Life.

E. M. Forser: The Complete Poems of C. P. Cavafy.

Virginia Woolf: Ernest Hemingway.

Part VII: Travel Writings:Desmond MacCarthy: Two Historic Houses.

E. M. Forster: Cnidus.

Leonard Woolf: Politics in Spain.

Virginia Woolf: Street Haunting.

Part VIII: Autobiographies:.

Vanessa Bell: Notes on Virginia's Childhood.

Lytton Strachey: Lancaster Gate.

Leonard Woolf: Coming to London.

Virginia Woolf: Old Bloomsbury.

Desmond MacCarthy: To Desmond MacCarthy aet. 22.

E. M. Forster: Three Countries, Clive Bell: Paris in the 'Twenties'.

Part IV: Letters:.

Roger Fry.

Lytton Strachey.

John Maynard Keynes.

Virginia Woolf.

Leonard Woolf.

E. M. Forster.

Part X: Diaries: .

Virginia Woolf: Diary.

Desmond MacCarthy: A Critic's Day-book.

Lytton Strachey: A Fortnight in France.

E. M. Forster: Indian Journal.

Commonplace Book.

Part XI: Afterwords:.

Roger Fry: Retrospect.

John Maynard Keynes: Concluding Notes on the General Theory.

E. M. Forster: A View without a Room.

Virginia Woolf: The Love of Reading.

"How I wish that I had had this book in spring semester of 1968 when I taught a course on the Bloomsbury Group at Creighton University in Omaha or may times since then when I've taught seminars on Virginia Woolf at Doane." Evelyn Harris Haller, Doane College

"In this stunning new collection, S. P. Rosenbaum has given us a rich selection of the group's own writings, brilliant pieces standing on their own, frequently hard to find, that demonstrate the wide range of topics, personalities, interests, written about with great wit and insight, that make Bloomsbury of such lasting fascination. It would be hard to imagine a better way to become acquainted with the group and for those who know it already to reread some favourite essays and to make new discoveries." Peter Stansky, Stanford University

"Will long be a standard anthology, I've no doubt, for both students and general readers." English

"Deserves a home in most literature collections." Book Review Digest

"This is an excellent selection. As a compendium of the shorter writings of the Bloomsbury Group it could scarcely have been bettered."Chris Ackerley, Journal of the Australasian Universities Language and Literature Association

S. P. Rosenbaum is the author of Victorian Bloomsbury and Edwardian Bloomsbury - the early literary history of the Bloomsbury Group. He is the editor of The Bloomsbury Group: A Collection of Memoirs, Commentary, and Criticism and Virginia Woolf's Women and Fiction: The Manuscript Versions of A Room of One's Own (Blackwell, 1991). Because whenever they wrote the members of Bloomsbury tried to write well, there is an abundant variety of illuminating and delightful reading to be found in the shorter prose works of the Group's novelists, biographers, critics, and even political economists. In A Bloomsbury Group Reader Professor Rosenbaum offers a representative selection of such writings by Virginia Woolf, E. M. Forster, Lytton Strachey, Roger Fry, Desmond MacCarthy, Clive Bell, Leonard Woolf, John Maynard Keynes, and Vanessa Bell. His Focus in this selection is not upon the lives of the Group but upon what finally must justify our interest in them: their work, in this instance, as writers.

Bloomsbury writers particularly enjoyed the modernist mixing of forms, combining fact with fiction, polemics with aesthetics, humour with history. The pieces in this collection have therefore been arranged according to their genre and are complete in themselves, though some are parts of larger works. They pass from the objective to the subjective - from genres in which the writer's presence is least felt in the work to those in which it may be dominant. The sequence from stories, biographies, and essays through reviews, polemics, and talks to travel writings and memoirs is framed by the forewords and afterwords written for some of Bloomsbury's books.

Several familiar texts, such as E. M. Forster's 'What I Believe' or Virginia Woolf's 'Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown', have been included here, but many others are far well known. Virginia Woolf's biography of her great aunt, for example, has not yet been collected. While Desmond MacCarthy's introduction to the First Post-Impressionist Exhibition catalogue and Leonard Woolf's very early review of Freud are believed never to have been previously reprinted.