You're Dead to Me - The Bloomsbury Group (Radio Edit)

Episode Date: May 3, 2024

Greg Jenner is joined by Dr Jane Goldman and comedian Suzi Ruffell as he travels back a century to1920s London to learn all about the members of the Bloomsbury Group. A collection of intellectuals and artists active in London in the early twentieth century, the Bloomsbury Group included such luminaries as Virginia Woolf, E. M. Forster, and John Maynard Keynes. From their origins at the University of Cambridge to their bohemian lifestyle in London in the 1910s and 20s, and taking in their political work, artistic output, and boundary-pushing relationships, this episode explores the lives, loves and cultural impact of Bloomsbury Group members.This is a radio edit of the original podcast episode. For the full-length version, please look further back in the feed.Research by: Madeleine Bracey, Andrew Himmelberg, and Josh Rice Written by: Emmie Rose Price-Goodfellow, Emma Nagouse and Greg Jenner Produced by: Emmie Rose Price-Goodfellow and Greg Jenner Audio Producer: Steve Hankey Senior Producer: Emma Nagouse

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Hello and welcome to Your Dead To Me, the Radio 4 comedy podcast that takes history seriously. My name is Greg Jenner. I'm a public historian, author and broadcaster. And for our 100th episode, hooray, party pop is in the air. We are firing up the Your Dead to Me time machine and travelling back a hundred years to learn all about some extraordinary intellectuals and creatives, the Bloomsbury Group. And joining us for our very own Your Dead to Me centenary are two very special guests. In History Corner, she's a poet and academic at the University of Glasgow, where she's a reader in English literature. She's an expert on the life and literature of Virginia Woolf and is general editor of the Cambridge University Press edition of Woolf's works.

It's Dr. Jane Goldman. Welcome, Jane. Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here. Lovely to have you here. And in Comedy Corner, she's a comedian, podcaster, and writer. You'll have seen her loads on the telly on Mock the Week,

The Last Leg, Live at the Apollo, and heard her loads on Radio 4, various comedy shows, or on her podcasts, Out, Like-Minded Friends, and Big Kick Energy. And you'll definitely remember her from our episode about LGBTQ history. loads on Radio 4, various comedy shows or on her podcasts out like-minded friends and big kick energy and you'll definitely remember her from our episode about LGBTQ history it's the sensational Suzy Ruffall welcome back Suzy. Hello thank you for having me. Our 100th episode. It feels special. It feels very special. It does indeed. You've worn a fedora in the dress. I'm dressed as Virginia Woolf I hope you appreciate that. No I'm silly but no, it's lovely to have you here and we found out last time that

you didn't love history at school but actually you like history. Yes. What do you know of the Bloomsbury Group? Is that a history you've got in your head? I found school very hard and I probably mentioned this before, I'm quite severely dyslexic and I think that just makes all of school difficult if you don't have great teachers but I do have a general interest in history and what do I know about the Bloomsbury Group? I know that it was in the first half of the 1900s and they were a group of sort of academics and artists

and people that knew a lot about stuff. I know that lots of them went to Cambridge and the women were at King's. Is that a thing? And then I know that Virginia of them went to Cambridge and the women were at King's. Ah. Is that a thing? And then I know that Virginia Woolf had a sister who was an artist, I think they were both in it. There were lots of people that were having lots of different relationships.

So what do you know? ["The Blue Danube March"] Mrs. Wario, I have a go at guessing what you, our lovely listener, might know about today's subject. And I reckon you've heard of the Bloomsbury Group, much like Susie, you might know as much as Susie. They're also sometimes known as the Bloomsbury set.

And you may have heard of a couple of the members, superstar novelist Virginia Woolf, author of various books, including A Room of One's Own, Mrs. Dalloway. And perhaps you know the novels of E.M. Forster or have seen one of his big or small screen adaptations, Passage to India, Howard's End, A Room with a View. And if you're a fan of progressive economics and government investment, hey, who isn't? Then you'll know about John Maynard Keynes and Keynesian economics. What do we know about this gregarious group who, according to the American writer Dorothy Parker, lived in squares, painted in circles and loved in triangles. Let's find out. Right, this is 100th episode of Your Dead to Me.

We're all very chuffed. We thought it'd be fun to jump back to 1924 to go back 100 years. Then we realized that's actually not gonna work because their life sprawls over three decades. So we've abandoned that plan. We're just doing the Bloomsbury Group. But Susie, we're gonna take you to 1915.

I imagine you've been to plenty of cool London parties in the 21st century. Hey, listen, Greg, it's true, I'm kinda cool. So what are you imagining as a 1915 cool London party? What is the vibe, do you think? So I'm thinking, have you seen that Stephen Fry film, Bright Young Things? Is that kind of the vibe? Okay.

I don't know if that's the right period at all, but I feel like, would it be Flappers? No, is that the wrong period? Tiny bit early, 1915 is during the First World War. First World War. So a little bit before the flappers. Okay, so we're keeping the home fires burning, we're crying, the Titanic's just sunk, people are wearing those sorts of things, people are talking about the unsinkable Molly Brown.

Rose is still alive, Jack's very much dead. Is that good? Good guesses, I mean, I'm enjoying them. Jane, this party was thrown by the brilliantly named Lady Oteline Morell. So this is the 25th of March 1915, Lady Oteline Morell's house. What is it about this party that sums up the Bloomsbury group? Oteline Morell hosted weekly revels in her Bloomsbury home against the war, supporting conscientious objectors and pacifists. Writer Arnold Bennett's diary entry for the 25th of March 1915 talks about the festivities

that began with a radical art exhibition before moving to the Morels, I quote, gathering of an immense reunion of art students, painters and queer people, girls in fancy male costume, queer dancing, etc. Fine pictures, glorious drawings by Picasso, excellent impression of host and hostess. That's what he says in his diary. Wow. I mean mean that sounds like quite the shindig. Yeah it really does now Bloomsbury at that period obviously we think of Bloomsbury now it's sort of quite it's very out market it's quite gg then would it have been? No it was a dump and it wasn't it wasn't the place for young ladies to really live. Even though they were all wealthy right they

were all wealthy to a degree. Yeah. But Susie, there was a very important lexicographical landmark in that diary entry. Do you want to get to what it was? We're going to have to start with what lexicographical means. I mean, in terms of linguistic heritage and history, there was a word used in that diary entry by Arnold Bennett that's really important. Do you know what the word was? Was it queer? Yeah, it was. It was the first ever use of that's really important. Do you know what the word was? Was it queer? Yeah it was.

Yay! It was the first ever use of that in published writing. Right. To mean unusual. No. To mean a sexual orientation. The Oxford English Dictionary cites Arnold Bennett's term queer in this diary entry as the earliest published modern usage of the word queer. But also what's clear from Bennett's diary entry is that Bloomsbury was already synonymous with queer and Bloomsbury and sex were synonymous and they championed at the same time avant-garde European art and their own Bloomsbury style of art.

All right, so Susie, during this episode we are going to be bombarding you with very complicated personal relationships between people. So we thought we'd actually help you navigate that by printing off a kind of relationship map that hopefully is in front of you. Our fantastic PhD student Madeline has put this together. It is a sort of L-word style. I was going to say, this is, I mean, if we were doing an episode on the L word, I'd feel like I knew a lot more. I'll be able to talk about the dynamics between Carmen and Shane until the cows come home. Yeah. So you've got quite a lot of names on there and how they're related to each other.

You can see that it's going to get quite messy as we go. So this is your life raft. Just look down at this and you'll know where we are. This can't be my life raft. It's far too confusing. Now, although we've said the Bloomsbury group is based around Bloomsbury, which I think is entirely fair, well actually Susie, you've already alluded to this, Cambridge, how does Cambridge sort of predate Bloomsbury? Partly, it began at the turn of the 20th century

when Toby Stephen, Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell's brother, went to Cambridge University. At Cambridge, Toby hung out with a secret, all-male, elite intellectual conversation group, the Cambridge Apostles. God! They couldn't think of anything worse. Go on. Oh no, you might be pleasantly surprised. Fans of philosopher G. E. Moore and he recommended the pleasures of human intercourse and the admiration of beautiful objects. And I think some of the Bloomsbury group took that intercourse quite literally.

The members were Clive Bell, Leonard Wolfe, Lytton Strachey, Toby Stephen, Adrian Stephen, E.M. Forster and John Maynard Keynes. But they also pulled in Lytton Strachey's handsome Scottish cousin Duncan Grant, who was at art college at the time. So these are our fancy nerds. And they're all having a good time. They are a member of this secret organisation called the Cambridge Apostles, quite obscure. And on the 5th of May 1901, they wrestled with the eternal question, Susie, the big one we've all asked. Yeah. Are crocodiles the best of animals? No. I'm pleased you've had this chat and I'm pleased you've invited

me in for it. Now, can I ask a quick question? Would all of these men have been, I'm not suggesting they were elitist, but they would all have been from wealth to a degree, to go to Cambridge at that time. Short answer, yes. They would all expect sort of positions of administration in the empire and lots of them went to Eton, then Cambridge and came from... But some of them were also anti-imperialists, right? Of course. It's referred to as the Bloomsbury Fraction by Raymond Williams, the idea that some of the elite turns against itself. So a lot of Virginia Woolf's work is about looking at how people are inducted into a system that they know is wrong.

Okay, so we've introduced Toby Stephen. I'll be honest, Jane, I've never heard of him, but the older brother of Virginia and Vanessa. Yeah, well, poor Toby died tragically young but he's responsible for moving himself and his siblings out to Bloomsbury from the posh house that they'd lived in. It's there that Toby began hosting Thursday evenings to keep up conversation or intercourse with his Cambridge friends. And this was radical because now it included women with a radical openness and no taboos to the conversation. So then his sister Vanessa began the Friday Club in 1905, focusing on visual art, but covering all the same loose topics as well.

I guess we should start with the writers because that's the Thursday gang. Have you heard of E.M. Forster? I have. Yeah? So I knew that he was a writer and I know that he was gay. Yeah. Did he write about India? Did he travel a lot to India? Yeah, he passed to India, yeah. Yeah, that's it. That's good summary. Jane, do you want to give us a bit more detail? Well, he was born in London in 1879 and he was baptised Edward Morgan Forster, avoiding being baptised Henry because his dad accidentally gave his own name to the vicar. I love that. At Cambridge, Forster was massively influenced by the openly gay and feminist Edward Carpenter. Forster too was gay and

the greatest love of E.M. Forster's life was Bob Buckingham, a burly young policeman whom he met in 1930. And despite Buckingham's marriage, at which Forster was a witness, their relationship flourished for years. Yeah. Was he writing about queer stuff or was it like coded? No, so this is a great question, Susie. This is coded. But there is a very famous important book of his called, is it Maurice or Maurice? Maurice.

Yeah. So basically he published between 1905 and 1910 four novels, but he finished this book, Maurice, in 1914. However, it was only published posthumously a year after he died in 1971 because it's about a gay relationship with what he called an imperative happy ending. So Forster wrote about this, I was determined that in fiction anyway, two men should fall in love and remain in it for the ever and ever that fiction allows. We get such a trope of the bury your gaze trope where LGBTQ stories often end with tragedy. Yeah. And he was sort of saying it's imperative that this one is happy ever after.

And that's something that still happens now. There's the cliche of killing off lesbians. It's so common. Another person we have to talk about is John Maynard Keynes and your relationship map, Susie, you will probably see there's quite a lot going on between John Maynard Keynes, Lydden Strachey, and Duncan Grant, the three of them. Yeah, he's quite busy.

Yeah. So he is this sort of great genius economist. Jane, do you want to give us a brief press of him? Okay, born in 1883, he was educated at Eton, then Cambridge, an economics and maths genius, whom his school banned from maths competitions because it was unfair on the other kids. His major work, General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, Brilliant. Challenged classical economic theories arguing for government intervention

as necessary to stabilise economies during recessions. It had a profound impact on economic thought and policy until about 1979 when Margaret Thatcher came in and supposedly burned a copy of Keynes on Downing Street steps. That's probably not true, but people say... It's a great story. It's a good story. Let me just get this right. He would have been all for sort of nationalised stuff. Yeah. He's not a capitalist, but he thinks that there's more to life, you know, going

back to those Cambridge conversations. Pleasure, beautiful things, everybody deserves that. And that economics is a fiction and you can intervene and restructure. He basically believes government is there for a purpose to serve the people. Well, I mean, it seems like a wild idea given our current politics. Yeah, OK. Yeah, so let's now move on to the visual artists. Can we have a punnet of Bloomsbury's who do art, please, Jane?

OK, well, let's start with Vanessa Stevens, sister of Virginia, born 1879, studied at Arthur Cope School of Art from 1896, also attended King's College London like a sister for a while, and the Royal Academy School from 1901. Three years after moving to Bloomsbury with her siblings, she married her brother's friend, the art critic Clive was a huge Francophile and he went on to have a lifelong friendship with Picasso. You know, so they were very well connected with all the major European artists. And would those artists have been massive at that point?

They were superstars by then. And Vanessa, initially inspired by new English art, had her head turned by the 1910 Post-Impressionists exhibition, which was showing continental works by Manet, Cézanne, Gauguin, Van Gogh, all by then dead, but absolutely shocking to the British public and the critics. They were shown alongside living modern French artists. Her own avant-garde paintings and collages were then shown in the second post-impressionist exhibition in 1912. Vanessa Bell showed work alongside other Bloomsbury's like Duncan Grant, Roger Fry and Wyndham Lewis who was originally in Bloomsbury but fell

out with them over the Ideal Home exhibition and then wrote really nasty things about them. The Ideal Home exhibition nowadays is where you go to buy like tin openers and sort of find like, you know, get a discount on a sofa. Yeah, but back then it was like the cutting edge of thinking about domestic aesthetics. Right. Vanessa Bell's artwork became increasingly bold and experimental, and she's actually credited after Frantisek Kupka with one of the earliest totally abstract paintings in Europe. And people would have been stunned by them in a way. Yes, stunned or very angry.

Yeah, because they would have thought, this is an art because I can't see a picture in it. Exactly. And would it be more about what it made you feel? Exactly, exactly. Rather than oh that's a house. It's yeah. I feel angry. Vanessa Bell is obviously an unconventional person in terms of her art. She's also gonna have an unconventional marriage because that's what they do. They had two sons, Julian and Quentin. Meanwhile, I think when Vanessa was very heavily into early motherhood,

Clive had a very serious flirtation with her sister, Virginia. Oh no. He was soon off with other women. The Bells remained married, but both had soon off with other women. The Bells remained married but both had significant relationships with other people. Between 1911 and 1913, Vanessa had a serious relationship with the artist critic Roger Fry. In 1913, Roger Fry, Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant founded the Omega workshops based in Fitzroy Square. Artists could exhibit and sell their works in this space, which was designed to explore new forms and media, including tarting up old furniture.

Vanessa and Duncan experimented there with textiles, pottery, furniture, and kinetic art. So Roger Fry and Vanessa Bell have a relationship, break up and then found a workshop together. A classic. Yeah, can you imagine setting up with an ex? It's gotta be pretty chill. I don't think we'll be selling much. I think we'll be arguing a lot. So Vanessa Bell, not only having a relationship with Frye, not only setting up the Omega workshops, she also was involved with Duncan Grant, who was of course, who was also involved with

Keynes and Lytton Strachey. I mean, Vanessa Bell has a daughter with Duncan Grant and she's called Angelica Bell, not the BBC children's presenter. She's lovely. Yeah. Angelica Bell, who's raised as Clive's daughter, even though it's Duncan's daughter. That's right. And she didn't know until she was, I think, 18, right, her real father was. But also, we've since discovered this big stash of Grant's more queer erotic art. And he's now known as a queer artist of some import and he left a substantial body of work exploring queer sexuality i.e. loads of male nudes. Sure. All stashed under the bed.

Wow! Okay so we've mentioned the Stephen siblings, Toby, Vanessa, Adrienne, who of course, you know, are sister to Virginia. So I think Virginia Woolf is probably the most famous Bloomsbury. So tell us about her then. Her dad, Leslie Stephen, founding editor of the Dictionary of National Biography, and he came from a long line of important social reformers and abolitionists. Virginia Woolf was homeschooled as a child and then she attended, as you rightly said, King's College London, the ladies' department, 1897 to 1901. After Toby's death and Vanessa's marriage, Virginia and Adrian moved to 29 Fitzroy Square

and it was there that Virginia began her first novel and they entertained Bloomsbury friends. Virginia Woolf married Leonard Woolf and he was from a Jewish family. His father was a lawyer. He became a civil servant, you know, a sort of classic Empire man. Yeah. Leonard first met Virginia in 1903 but then he was off in Ceylon, Sri Lanka. And he's quite, he's an interesting guy because he's sort of a socialist. He's quite radical, getting involved in other literature and printing and The Wasteland, I think he helps out, doesn't he Jane? Yeah, well they got married in 1912 but Leonard and Virginia in 1917 founded their own press called the Hogarth Press. They did hand printed books as you've said, including Virginia Virginia Wolf set the type for T.S.

Eliot's The Waste Land when it was published. Oh, wow. She's the typesetter. Yeah, she personally was the typesetter. As importantly, she helped Leonard with his most important anti-imperialist work, which is called Empire and Commerce in Africa, published in 1920. Now, she confessed to received, ingrained and continuing anti-Semitism and snobbery and she said later, how I hated marrying a Jew, what a snob I was. She was born an anti-Semite but maybe she changes her views. There's a lot of anti-Semitic utterances in

her diaries and letters, however. Yeah, and they had a happy marriage. A very long and happy marriage. However, she also once confessed feeling no physical attraction to him. She also defined herself as a kind of attracted to men and women, including one she said about a later girlfriend that she felt desire for Ethel Smythe, a suffragist composer. Yeah, because I think Virginia Woolf is often publicly described by people as sort of neurotic

and sexless, which actually really is not true of her youth. Do you want to guess what the nickname that Virginia was given by her sister? It was an animalistic nickname. She had a bit of a dog. Like a dirty dog. The nickname was Goat. Greatest of all time. A goat as in billy goat, as in horny, roundy. She would chat people up on the train. Women on the train.

I mean, good for her. I think, listen, I love a journey on a train. And you know, I'm a notorious lesbian. So you know, I support all those things. Her best, most well-known love affair began in 1925 with the aristocrat and author Vita Sackville-West. Virginia Woolf didn't rate her poetry but loved her long legs. Yeah, and we've also got this amazing novel dedicated to Vita called Orlando. Right.

Have you heard of Orlando? I've heard of Orlando. What do you know? That it's a bit lessy. Is that fair? Yeah, it is. Broadly lessy. Okay.

It was published, Orlando, a biography, 1928. It's Wolfe's brilliant queer love letter to Vita Sackville West. And it's the life of this cross-dressing polyamorous Elizabethan noble man. And he doesn't age or die, but he wakes up one day as a woman in Constantinople in the 18th century. And then she continues a life of cross-dressing polyamory as a woman into the 20th century. And on the last page it says October 1928, the day the book is published. Did they publish their own works?

They have like a publishing house. Yeah, that's right, the Hogarth Press. So once Virginia Woolf was able to take hold of the means of production, then she had the freedom. So with Jacob's Room, Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, The Waves and Between the Acts, they were all published by the Hogarth Press. And that way, she had control. A publishing house of one's own. Yeah, exactly. But then they published all their maids, but then they also published, I mean, the major

works of Freud for the first time in English. Gertrude Stein, you name it. She also published two major feminist manifestos, which should be on your reading list, A Room of One's Own in 1929 and Three Guineas 1938. Several volumes worth of essays and short stories and her posthumously published masses of volumes of letters and diaries, they're riveting reading, riveting. All right, so we've met the Bloomsbury's,

as they call themselves. What are your sort of overarching feelings having bombarded you with all this information before we get to the nuance window? Well, just that they were massive change makers. You know a lot of what they did influenced where we are today. Certainly a lot of their free thinking and unapologetic queerness is certainly something that needs to be celebrated and feels enormously hopeful but you know when you look at people throughout history you also have to accept things about them that you don't like as well.

The Nuance Window! But it's time we get to our Nuance Window. This is part of the show where Susie and I relax in Lady Morrell's salon with our pianola. Well, Dr Jane tells us something we need to know about the Bloomsbury group. So my stopwatch is ready, Jane. You have two minutes. Take it away, please. But you may say what happened in December 1910 to make Virginia Woolf say on or about December 1910 human character changed? New King, government crisis over Irish home rule. Bonfire Night was Bloomsbury's in 1910. Post-impressionism's explosion of colour got rid of chiaroscuro, art's old binary casting of dark and shade. Now it's fireworks, this new prismatic chiaroscuro, this violent

rapture of colour. Bloomsbury's stops us seeing in binary light, dark, white, black, male, female, master, slave. Bloomsbury's vibrating prismatics is a new queer way of seeing. In 1910, outraged critics feared this art would goganize the European landscape, goganize the Aryan race. These are quotes. This unpatriotic campaign of anarchism, evil plague, sickening aberrations, mania for painting flesh with mud, making Eve's fair daughters look unwashed. Now, outside on the streets comes Black Friday, November 1910. Thousands of suffragettes, purple, white, green, peaceful women demonstrators, met with police brutality and mass arrest. Virginia Woolf attended their Albert Hall rally November 1910. Woolf's 1940 essay,

Thoughts of Peace in an Air Raid, says it all. Thank you. Thank you so much, Jane. Fantastic. Quite a series of lives. Yeah fascinating people. So there we go the Bloomsbury Group. I'd just like to say a huge thank you to our guests in History Corner. We have the fantastic Dr Jane Goldman from the University of Glasgow. Thank you Jane. Thank you it's been an absolute pleasure and an education. And in Comedy Corner we have the superb Susie Ruffle. Thank you Susie. Thank you for having me. I've learnt a lot and now I've got a very big reading list. And to you lovely listener, join me next time as we drop in on another historical group

of go-getters. But for now I'm off to go and debate crocodiles with my four year olds. Bye! Why do some of the brands we love most hit dizzy heights but then ultimately end up toast? I'm Sean Farrington, presenter of the BBC Radio 4 series Toast, which unpicks what went wrong with big business ideas and examines why they were so popular in the first place. We hear from people directly involved in building a brand's fortunes. Everybody still wanted it to work. So I saw an opportunity to try and make that happen.

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