On or About December 1910: Early Bloomsbury and Its Intimate World (Studies in Cultural History)

Stansky, Peter

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0674636058 ISBN 13: 9780674636057

Publisher: Harvard University Press, 1996

On or about December 1910 human character changed, Virginia Woolf remarked, and well she might have. The company she kept, the Bloomsbury circle, took shape before the coming of World War I, and would have a lasting impact on English society and culture after the war. This book captures the world of Bloomsbury at the end of an era, and on the eve of modernism. Peter Stansky depicts the vanguard of a rising generation seizing its moment. He shows us Woolf in that fateful year, in the midst of an emotional breakdown, reaching a turning point with her first novel, "The Voyage Out", and E.M. Forster, already a success, offering "Howards End" and acknowledging his passion for another man. Here are Roger Fry, prominent art critic and connoisseur, remaking tradition with the exhibition "Manet and the Post-Impressionists"; Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant beginning their most interesting phase as artists; Lytton Strachey signing the contract for his first book; and John Maynard Keynes entering a significant new stage in his career. Amid the opulence and poverty, the Suffragists, anarchists, agitators and organizers, Stansky brings the world of the Bloomsbury group to life. Their lives, relationships, writings and ideas entwine. Even their "Dreadnought" hoax, a trick played on the sacred institution of the navy, reveals their boldness and esprit. The picture Stansky presents encompasses the conflicts and sureties of a changing world of politics, aesthetics and character.

Review:

[Stansky] brings together the many strands of personal, literary, social, and artistic history that were to form the core of the modernist movement. Although much of this information can be gleaned from the individual biographies, this intense focus on a single, eventful year, rather than on the personalities, is quite successful. Stansky is able to give a vivid and immediate understanding of an era important to students of 20th-century culture. -- Library Journal

About the Author:

Peter Stansky is the Frances and Charles Field Professor of History at Stanford University.