Publisher's Synopsis
This reader offers a representative selection of writings by Virginia Woolf, E.M. Forster, Lytton Strachey, Roger Fry, Desmond MacCarthy, Clive Bell, Leonard Woolf, John Maynard Keynes and Vanessa Bell. The focus is not upon the lives of the Bloomsbury group but upon 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 virtually unknown such as Virginia Woolf's biography of her great aunt, for example. 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.
