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Bloomsbury relates to the group of young Cambridge graduates in the early 1900s who continued their friendship at weekly soirees in the Bloomsbury district of London.

Thoby Stephen invited his friends to meet in his home which he shared with his two sisters, Virginia and Vanessa. Although the two attractive young women had not attended college, they became a part of the group. Evenings were filled with conversations which were in depth and often far from the social and moral standards of the time. The friends would read papers to each other as they had done in seminars at Cambridge. The ideas they discussed were abstract - truth and beauty. Their conversations were stimulating - so much that members of this group eventually advanced modern thinking individually in their own pursuits.

Although they are now referred to as "The Bloomsbury Group," various people came to the weekly gatherings. Historically, members of the group differ according to whether the group is being discussed as artists or writers, sometime friends, or intimates. During this year’s Book Adventures tour, the focus will be on Virginia Woolf as the pivotal literary person and her sister, Vanessa Bell as the key to the artists of Charleston. Others who will come into discussion are Leonard Woolf, Vita Sackville-West, E. M. Forster; Rupert Brooke, Lytton Strachey, Dora Carrington, John Maynard Keynes, Clive Bell, Duncan Grant and Roger Fry. The choice is eclectic but intended to be intriguing.

In literature the successful author creates a sense of place so clearly that the reader visualizes it in the imagination. On a literary tour, the reader finds reality with all the senses and links the reality to the imagination. It is the meshing of the two that enables a joyful reinterpretation. Beyond that, viewing the realia of the author - the home, the writing tools, the landscape scenes, the titles on the bookshelves - gives a view of the author that adds to the understanding of the literary inspiration. The Book Adventures Bloomsbury Tour will feature several walking tours related to Virginia Woolf and her work. One will be a walking tour through the Bloomsbury district of London, a Mrs. Dalloway walk in London, a stroll through Richmond where Virginia and Leonard Woolf first established the Hogarth Press, and walks in Lewes and at Monks House where Virginia and Leonard Woolf spent their final years. An exhibit of E.M. Forster’s manuscripts will be specifically arranged for this group from the Modern Archives at Cambridge University. Participants will also view manuscripts of Virginia Woolf and Lytton Strachey at the new home of the British Library. Time and place of the past will be sensed while taking tea at The Orchard, a lovely tearoom which poet Rupert Brooke recalled in his writing. The homes of Virginia and Leonard Woolf and of Vanessa and Clive Bell and Duncan Grant will deepen that sense of the personal lives of the writers and artists.

from BLOOMSBURY: A Book Adventures Tour in England

Duping tradition was also the favorite pastime of the artist and art critics in the group.In 1910, Roger Fry, a well-known art historian and expert on European works, brought the show "Manet and the Post-Impressionists" to England. Thought scandalous by some--others laughed outright--the exhibit introduced to the English the underlying concept of modern art: that form, rather than subject, could be an important medium for discussion. Cezanne's painting in particular was admired by Bloomsbury artists, and his influence can be recognized in the Stanford exhibit.

It was a theme that Woolf drew upon in her writing, perfecting the fragmented style of modernism--an experiment in writing that confounded the organization and time line of a novel rather than simply telling a chronological story.

But the Bloomsbury Group on its own cannot be given total credit for the advent of the modern. Some thought them garishly snobbish, pretentious and unpatriotic (many among their ranks claimed conscientious objection to World War I and fled from London to the countryside). No love was lost between the groups and novelist D.H. Lawrence, who once referred to them as "little swarming selves."

Desmond McCarthy, a newspaper critic and probably the least well-known member of the set, described the animosity this way: "Writers and painters who are indignant, sometimes rightly, sometimes wrongly, at their works not meeting with universal praise, and looking about for an explanation of the inexplicable, have been known to mutter darkly 'Bloomsbury' and find relief."

Which seems only to be testimony to the group's wide-ranging influence.

from The Bloomsbury Group: creating a new modern world