A Circle of Friends: Bloomsbury and the Art of Modernism

By Wendy Hitchmough

How one hugely influential circle of friends transformed twentieth-century British culture and society through a web of intimate relationships and wider connections.

The Bloomsbury Group revolutionised the novel, economics, biography, painting and the decorative arts in the first half of the twentieth century. They lived and worked together, promoted one another, corresponded about every detail of their lives, and shared a network of friends, colleagues and lovers. They were able to get on in society, to write, to paint, to infiltrate government departments and to publish their controversial opinions because of this matrix of connections

Drawing from never before published intimate correspondence, Wendy Hitchmough interrogates the group's influence on visual culture: from Roger Fry's notorious exhibition Manet and the Post-Impressionists to the network hubs of The Omega Workshops and the Hogarth Press. A Circle of Friends re-frames pivotal moments in Bloomsbury's history and charts its impact across the pages of Vogue, at the BBC, and in the foundation of the Arts Council. It recreates the Bloomsbury hubs that brought together feminists, pacifists and radical thinkers, and it explores the depth and breadth of connections that guaranteed Bloomsbury's success and ensured its enduring resonance today.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0300269226
• ISBN13: 9780300269222
• Release Date: April 2027
• Publisher: Yale University Press
• Length: 352 Pages