Mapping the intricacies of a dazzling social world, Nino Strachey’s intergenerational history of the Bloomsbury Group traces and celebrates the queer lineage that extended beyond the confines of ‘Old Bloomsbury’, in an open, generous account that is both biography and cultural history.
It might seem as if there’s little new to uncover about the complicated lives of the Bloomsbury group, which has come to be defined by Dorothy Parker’s infamous observation that its members ‘lived in squares and loved in triangles’. Their experiment in living and loving outside of society’s norm has lost its radical edge and is now more typically associated with upper-class eccentricity. However, Nino Strachey’s Young Bloomsbury: A New Queer History offers a fascinating intervention that breathes life into a familiar narrative. Strachey casts her net wider than the familiar ‘Old Bloomsbury’ group headed up by Virginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant, Clive Bell, and Lytton Strachey (a relation of Nino Strachey’s), introducing readers to lesser-known ‘Young Bloomsbury’ acolytes and associates. Her intergenerational approach is refreshing and makes for a lively, voluble read. By drawing on her family archive – along with correspondence, bequests, and forgotten novels – Strachey maps an intergenerational network that not only fostered a supportive environment for its younger members, but also re-energised its elders: we find Woolf giddily writing to Bell that she had ‘fallen in love’ after meeting devoted Bloomsbury fan Noel Coward (who was almost twenty years her junior), and Duncan Grant ‘crowing’ to Bell that ‘Vogue this week is full of us’, thanks to young journalist and 1920s ‘social influencer’ Raymond Mortimer.
Young Bloomsbury bursts with colourful scenes of connection and seduction. Strachey takes us on a dazzling whirl across endless parties, debates, and intimate tête-à-têtes – from Eddy Sackville-West and Nancy Morris’s ‘hermaphrodite party’ and louche studio soirees where Vogue editor Dorothy Todd and her partner Madge Garland danced the night away, to intimate garden gatherings at Ham Spray, home of Dora Carrington, Lytton Strachey, Ralph Partridge, and various lovers. From the outset, Strachey makes clear that Bloomsbury’s parties, costumes, and bed-hopping have a serious side. Her subject is – deliberately – timely. Published amid a modern-day moral panic that threatens the rights and freedoms of the queer community, particularly trans and gender non-conforming people, Strachey aims to trace and celebrate a queer lineage that extended beyond the confines of ‘Old Bloomsbury’. Her careful research fills the gaps and elisions that beset queer histories, weaving a rich tapestry of care and compassion that extends across the generations. Mapping this intimate social scene across the decades of the early twentieth century also enriches our understanding of key Bloomsbury creative works. Strachey reveals that Woolf’s encounters with cross-dressing Bright Young Things and sexual libertines like up-and-coming actress Valerie Taylor (whose conquests included Clive Bell and his lover, the writer Mary Hutchinson, and her lover Vita Sackville-West, as well as Duncan Grant, and psychoanalyst Alix Strachey) fed into her queer tour-de-force Orlando. Similarly, she notes the influence of Young Bloomsbury’s drag costume parties on the appearance of ‘androgynous classical or commedia dell’arte figures’ in the work of artists Grant and Carrington.
Young Bloomsbury is attentive to the anguish that accompanied living outside society’s limits, particularly at a time when homosexuality was illegal, LGBT nightclubs were routinely raided, and the 1857 Obscene Publications Act censored expressions of queer sexuality (the 1928 trial of Radcliffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness outraged Bloomsbury). At certain points, the century-long gap between the Bloomsbury group’s world and our own contracts: the conversion therapy that ‘young Bloomsbury’ Eddy Sackville-West and some of his gender non-conforming contemporaries were persuaded to try in the 1920s is legal in the UK today. As the parent of a gender fluid, queer child, Strachey’s mission to celebrate and bring to light queer lineages in the face of discrimination and erasure is also deeply personal.
The fact that Young Bloomsbury is a personal endeavour (with a focus on the Strachey family and its archive) lends to its warmth, but is also a limitation. Despite looking beyond the Old Bloomsbury circle, Young Bloomsbury still centres on an elite group of wealthy, well-connected individuals. In treating them as pioneers who ‘defied conventional morality and lived to tell the tale’, Young Bloomsbury positions its upper-class cast as exceptional in their gender and sexual nonconformity. Strachey describes the young and old Bloomsbury group as ‘outsiders from the mainstream’, but their wealth and titles rooted them within institutions of power that offered protection from prosecution or destitution. As I finished Young Bloomsbury, I was reminded of lines from Saidiya Hartman’s innovative act of archival recovery Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, which explores the ‘transformation of intimate life’ enacted by young African American women in the early twentieth century: ‘Few, then or now, recognized young black women as sexual modernists, free lovers, radicals and anarchists, or realized that the flapper was a pale imitation of the ghetto girl’. I thought, too, of Hugh Ryan’s The Women’s House of Detention: a Queer History of a Forgotten Prison, a powerful study that recovers stories of ‘queer women and transmasculine people were sent to [New York’s] House of Detention [between 1929 and 1974] for such crimes as…smoking…wearing pants…sending the word lesbian through the mail…being alone in the street…and lesbianism itself’ (most of them working-class). This is not to say that Young Bloomsbury’s subject isn’t worthy, but rather that we must be wary of treating privileged groups as exceptional, to ensure that queer, radical histories are expansive and acknowledge webs of influence and exchange often left out of even progressive studies.
For both Bloomsbury fans and the uninitiated, Young Bloomsbury draws readers into a dazzling world in which revolutions in literary and artistic forms collided with huge shifts in the self and intimate relationships, a society shot through with new desires and dreams, where emerging technologies such as telephones and airplanes were bringing people closer. Strachey opens up valuable new ways into the Bloomsbury group and its legacies; her intergenerational focus offers a more generous, open approach to biography and cultural history – a welcome departure from the obsession with genius that often defines studies of figures such as Woolf. In this new queer history, Old Bloomsbury dazzle afresh in the glare of the Bright Young Things.
Young Bloomsbury: A New Queer History by Nino Strachey is published by John Murray Press, and is available to order online and from all good bookshops. For more on Nino Strachey, visit her website.
Feature image: Nino Strachey by Alex Schneideman.