Bloomsbury Recalled

By Quentin Bell

Book Overview

In Bloomsbury Recalled, Quentin Bell has written an extraordinary memoir of the circle of intellectuals in London early in this century know as the Bloomsbury group. Bell offers remarkable judgments about and recollections of each of the notable people among whom he came of age. Here are Bell's candid portraits of his parents, Clive and Vanessa Bell - Virginia Woolf's sister - Vanessa's lover, Duncan Grant, and of Virginia Woolf, Lytton Strachey, E. M. Forster, John Maynard Keynes, Roger Fry, Ottoline Morrell, and others who frequented Gordon Square in Bloomsbury and Charleston, the Bells' country place in Sussex. The stories of this enchanting extended family, the private lives of these public figures, have all the magic and intrigue of the best novels of the day. Bloomsbury Recalled, in the expansive storytelling tradition of the early modernists, re-creates the captivating theater of events that was Bloomsbury.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0231105657
• ISBN13: 9780231105651
• Release Date: January 1997
• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Length: 256 Pages
• Weight: 0.80 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 6.0" x 9.0"
• Grade Range: Postsecondary and higher

Customer Reviews

The Bloomsbury Set, recalled from inside out

In Bloomsbury Recalled, Quentin Bell, one of the sons of Virginia Woolf's sister, Vanessa, recalls those deeply interesting people of the infamous Bloomsbury Set in a collection of anecdotal and biographical sketches. It seems that anybody who was anyone in the world of art, letters, literature, and/or intellectuals appeared at some time within this circle of friends and lovers. This loose and shifting group of people alternately lived, worked, and loved together between 1900-1940, and included Virginia and Leonard Woolf, Vanessa and Clive Bell, E. M. Forster, Maynard Keynes, Lytton Strachey, and many other names that are familiar to today's readers. These personal recollections from Quentin Bell's childhood memories are a delight to read and prove enlightening not only with regard to his subjects but also of Bell himself.

An Amusing Memoir

The Bloomsbury section of London, which includes the British Museum and University College, is famous in literary circles as the former stomping ground of "the Bloomsbury group," a handful of Cambridge-educated intellectuals, notably Roger Fry (who founded the Omega Workshops), E.M. Forster, Lytton Stratchey, Virginia Woolf, and Woolf's sister, Vanessa, who was married to the critic Clive Bell (remembered for having invented the phrase "significant form"). The author is an artist, writer and the son of Clive and Vanessa Bell, who was born at Gordon Square in Bloomsbury in 1910. More than 60 years later, he published a two-volume biography of his aunt, titled Virginia Woolf; and now, at age 85, has written an often amusing memoir of her, his parents and other eccentric literary celebrities who resided or commonly visited there. (Copyright by Roy R. Behrens from Ballast Quarterly Review, Vol 11 No 4, Summer 1996)