Young Bloomsbury: the generation that reimagined love, freedom and self-expression

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Forster's Maurice was not unpublishable but rather Forster strictly forbade to be published until after he died.

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Strachey begins though with a rather uninspiring, potted history of the Bloomsbury group, before moving on to the next generation – Stephen Tennant, Eddy Sackville-West, Julia Strachey, Frances Marshall and others. But for readers, like me, who’ve already devoured a number of Bloomsbury Group studies and biographies there isn’t a lot that’s particularly revelatory here. Though there are times when the book points out that the upper classes were able to get away with more than the average person, it’s not all that critical of those situations.

The problem that the younger Bloomsbury set faced was that, as the Thirties approached, and politics and global depression appeared, then personal choice and freedom of self-expression again began to look self-absorbed. This lively group biography offers an intimate glimpse of the Bright Young Things, the artistic coterie that emerged in the nineteen-twenties as successors to the prewar Bloomsburyites.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. New members joined their ranks, pushing at boundaries, flouting conventions, and spurring their seniors to new heights of creative activity. The 1920s are a fascinating time in Western culture and this book dives deep into what creatives were up to at the time.

As scepticism, admiration, envy, and confusion ebb and flow between one chattering, seductive, thinking, inspiring generation and another, this is Gatsby made real. For a book which is tracing a sort of counterculture, it feels remarkably staid where I wanted flamboyance and something a bit more exciting. With a deft turn of the Bloomsbury kaleidoscope, and an impressive gift for finding treasures in the archives, Nino Strachey reveals colorful new patterns of experiments in living which speak trenchantly to our own cultural moment.

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. As a straight forward history of the characters that can be said to make up the Bloomsbury set, both young and old, this is a reasonably good book. I loved meeting all these individuals chronicled in more detail - and it was astounding to see how many parallels there were between this younger generation, and so many people I know and are friends with now, and the causes they advocate for. Virginia Woolf’s affection-shady letters provide the spine of the narrative but its heart—the polyamorous relationship between Lytton, Carrington, and Ralph Patridge—is almost entirely neglected in the second half.