The Bloomsbury Group: A Collection of Memoirs and Commentary. Rev. ed.

Bert Almon is a professor of English at the University of Alberta and
the author of Calling Texas and Earth Prime.

S.P. Rosenbaum has revised his standard anthology of writings by the
Bloomsbury Group, an early–20th-century intellectual circle of writers
and artists that met in London and included Virginia Woolf, Lytton
Strachey, and John Maynard Keynes. He has dropped the section of
critiques and views from critics of their own time and has added more
selections in the other three sections.

The book begins with “Bloomsbury on Bloomsbury,” writings about the
Group as a group by its members. This is followed by a section of the
“Bloomsberries’” writings about each other: Clive Bell discussed
by David Garnett, E.M. Forster discussed by Virginia Woolf, and so on.
The third section, “Bloomsbury Observed,” contains friendly
reminiscences by their contemporaries. The result is a comprehensive
view of an important literary and cultural circle.

Annotation is kept to a minimum for ease of reading, but Rosenbaum does
provide a long glossary of “identifications,” short entries
explaining persons and places. The book has a good set of bibliographies
and a full chronology. General readers interested in learning more about
the Group will profit from the book, but scholars will find it useful
too, because it assembles so many memoirs in one convenient volume.
Illustrations would have been a pleasant addition in a book dealing with
such remarkable individuals and with so many painters.