Bloomsbury Group

The Bloomsbury Group was an informal circle of English writers, artists and intellectuals who lived in or around the Bloomsbury district of London and met regularly from around 1905 through the interwar period, sharing an outlook that prized aesthetic and intellectual freedom, frank personal candor and a rejection of Victorian social and sexual convention. Its literary core included the novelist Virginia Woolf, whose modernist novels Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse and The Waves are among the group's most celebrated achievements, alongside the biographer and critic Lytton Strachey and the novelist E. M. Forster, while the economist John Maynard Keynes and the painters Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant extended the circle beyond literature. Deeply influenced by the philosopher G. E. Moore's ethics of personal relations and aesthetic experience, the group's members supported one another's work through the Hogarth Press, which Woolf and her husband Leonard Woolf founded and which published Woolf's own fiction alongside T. S. Eliot and other modernist contemporaries, and the Bloomsbury Group is generally treated as one of the central institutions of English literary Modernism.