Feeds:
Posts
Comments

Posts Tagged ‘Bloomsbury Group’

How the Bloomsbury group made Shakespeare their own

Posted in Bloomsbury, podcast, tagged , , , on Thursday 2 November 2023| 2 Comments »

Shakespeare and Bloomsbury. They may not seem to go together, but they do. And the Folger Shakespeare Library has created a podcast in its “Shakespeare Unlimited” series that explains how.

In episode 221, Harvard Professor Marjorie Garber explains how modernist writers of London’s Bloomsbury group made Shakespeare their own. In this conversation with Barbara Bogaev, she discusses the threads of Shakespeare that run through Woolf’s novels, how Lytton Strachey changed our perspective on Shakespeare’s late plays, and what got her interested in the Bloomsbury Group in the first place, according to the website.

Garber is the author of Shakespeare in Bloomsbury (2023), in which she traces the influence of Shakespeare on the members of the group, which included Virginia Woolf, E.M. Forster, Vanessa Bell, Dadie Rylands, Strachey, John Maynard Keynes, and others.

What surprised me was how widespread it was . . . they are all writers and they’re interested in style, but no matter what they’re writing about, Shakespeare comes in. . . He is for them the pinnacle of a certain kind of intellectual achievement.

Read more.

Read Full Post »

Maynard Keynes and Virginia Woolf in The Guest Lecture

Posted in Bloomsbury, books, Virginia Woolf, Woolf in Contemporary Fiction, tagged , , , on Saturday 22 April 2023| Leave a Comment »

Martin Riker’s protagonist in The Guest Lecture is Abby, an economist who has been denied tenure at her university for publishing a book about Maynard Keynes that is deemed derivative.

Because of her book’s popularity outside academia, she’s been invited to present a lecture to a lay audience. In a hotel room the night before, she’s preparing her talk in an imaginary conversation with Keynes himself.

She will discuss his “bohemian arty side,” so that the audience:

will depart having learned something about the Bloomsbury group, some bits and bobs of history. For example, the bizarre and wonderful factoid that Keynes was housemates with Virginia Woolf. They were friends and she at some point claimed to be jealous that he could do what she did—write beautifully—but she couldn’t do what he did—economics, politics.

Abby describes her office at home as:

A writing room. A reading and thinking room. A ‘room of one’s own’—which was my first Virginia Woolf book, incidentally, and remains a favorite example of how a conceptual argument—in this case about female autonomy, living your own life—can also be a practical argument, in a way Keynes probably appreciated.

I found the novel entertaining and educational, philosophical and thought-provoking. It’s interesting how Maynard Keynes has shed the stereotypical image of the serious and sober intellectual, as his colorful life and provocative views are explored in fiction here and also in E.J. Barnes’s Mr. Keynes’ Revolution and Mr. Keynes’ Dance and in Susan Sellers’ Firebird: A Bloomsbury Love Story.

Read Full Post »

Charleston Festival back in person through May 29

Posted in Bloomsbury, Charleston Farmhouse, events, Lytton Strachey, tagged , , , on Friday 20 May 2022| Leave a Comment »

The Charleston Festival is back — in person — beginning yesterday and running through May 29 at Charleston in Firle, Sussex.

The festival is the main fundraising event for the longtime home of Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant and the country refuge for the Bloomsbury group.

Of particular interest to Bloomsbury scholars is Sunday’s program with Alex Jennings and Jonathon Pryce. At 5:30 p.m., the actors will do a live reading of “The Love Lives of Lytton Strachey,” revealing “a playful and uncensored portrait of a queer universe, shared in glorious candid detail with trusted friends,” according to the website.

Read Full Post »

See the faces of Bloomsbury Group at Sheffield Museum

Posted in art, art exhibits, Bloomsbury, events, tagged , on Sunday 14 November 2021| Leave a Comment »

So many wonderful events, performances, and exhibits related to the Bloomsbury Group take place in England. Here is another I wish I could view — and it’s free. “Beyond Bloomsbury: Life, Love and Legacy,” an exhibit that chronicles the “lives, loves and work” of the group opens at the Millennium Gallery of the Sheffield Museums Nov. 25 and runs until Feb. 13, 2022.

The Vanessa Bell portrait of Leonard Woolf that graces the cover of his biography by Victoria Glendinning is just one of the Bloomsbury Group portraits included in the exhibit.

Curated through a partnership between Sheffield Museums, York Museums Trust and the National Portrait Gallery, the exhibition includes portraits of those who were intimately associated with the Bloomsbury Group, along with their peripheral friends and colleagues.

More than 140 works

Beyond Bloomsbury brings together more than 140 paintings, sculpture, works on paper and supporting material to celebrate key figures, including Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell. Most of the portraits included in the exhibit are informal and intimate.

It include paintings by Bell, Dora Carrington, Roger Fry and Duncan Grant, sculpture by Marcel Gimmond and Stephen Tomlin, and drawings and photographs by Cecil Beaton, George Charles Beresford, Lady Ottoline Morrell and John Nash.

Get introduced at a tour

The gallery is offering two free lunchtime tours to introduce viewers to the exhibit. Titled “Beyond Bloomsbury,” they will be held from 1-1:45 p.m. on Dec. 7 and Dec. 14.

Sheffield Museums are located at Arundel Gate, Sheffield S1 2PP.

Read Full Post »

Spend Valentine’s Day reading Bloomsbury Group love letters aloud

Posted in Bloomsbury, Virginia Woolf, tagged , , , on Monday 8 February 2021| Leave a Comment »

Members of the Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain will spend Valentine’s Day with Virginia Woolf reading love letters between members of the Bloomsbury Group aloud.

Letters will include those between Woolf and Vita Sackville-West.

The meeting and reading of romantic letters will take place via Zoom on Sunday, Feb. 14, at 8 p.m. GMT or 3 p.m. EST. Members of the VWSGB can register by emailing Marielle O’Neill at marielleoneill88@hotmail.com.

If you are not a member of the group, find out how you can join.

Read Full Post »

Older Posts »

%d