Volume 37, Number 5 · March 29, 1990
The Best of Bloomsbury
By Noel Annan
Letters of Leonard Woolf
edited by Frederic Spotts
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 616 pp., $29.95
Anyone who studies British culture in this century will find that many (though not all) the dominant ideas and attitudes in that culture are to be found in the Bloomsbury group. For the generation that grew up in the shadow of the First World War they were liberators—all the more so because they enraged the Establishment in London and the universities. After the Second World War Leavis and his followers dented their reputation, but the torrent of biographies, diaries, letters, and memoirs restored them to life by rescuing them from the stereotypes critics had created. For a few it had been all too much. 'Afraid of, no; marginally bored with, yes' was the title of one of Mark Boxer's cartoons. But they embodied more than any other movement the English response to the revolution in art and morals that we call Modernism.
Review, 3291 words
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