ho were the Bloomsbury set ?

"The nucleus of this group of friends had been formed at Cambridge, at the turn of the century, Most of them were undergraduates at Trinity or King's College. All were outstanding intellectually, and many of them belonged to the secret Cambridge intellectual society, which had already existed for several generations, called "The Apostles". They shared, or came to share, certain attitudes to life, to thought and to artistic creation largely derived from their near-contemporary and friend, the philosopher G.E.Moore. His Principia Ethica influenced all of them, not only while they were at Cambridge, but in fact for the remainder of their lives.

Colin de la Motte-Sherman

Several of these friends were to become famous in later years, notably Lytton Strachey as iconoclastic biographer of Eminent Victorians and Queen Victoria; Clive Bell as an eminent critic and (with Roger Fry, who only became associated with the group in 1910) impresario of the Post-Impressionist painters of the "School of Paris" in England; J.M.(Maynard) Keynes - later Lord Keynes - as revolutionary economist of world-wide renown; and Leonard Woolf, who is remembered now, perhaps unfairly, rather as devoted husband of a famous wife than as editor, publisher and left-wing political theorist and educator. He was the son of an eminent Jewish Q.C., one of eleven children who were left in straightened circumstances when their father died in 1892."

"Three other Cambridge men, all a little older, whose names have always been connected with Bloomsbury; were Bertrand Russell, the philosopher, held by most of them to be the most brilliant intellectually of all; Desmond MaCarthy (like Russell, also an "Apostle"), who has been justly described as the finest dramatic critic of his generation; and seeming to appear and disappear like a mole in their midst, E.M. (Morgan) Forster, the novelist. Duncan Grant, who in the eyes of the public was to become the quintessential Bloomsbury artist, was in fact a later arrival, only introduced by his cousin Lytton Strachey in 1907."

... Thoby Stephen, the elder son of Sir Leslie Stephen, .. had in his freshman year at Trinity joined the Midnight Society, ... of which Clive Bell, Lytton Strachey and Leonard Woolf were the leading lights. Thoby had 2 sisters, Vanessa and Virginia .. Vanessa married Clive Bell ...(1907) - Thoby died 1906) .. and in 1912 Virginia, already 30 years old, married Leonard W oolf, who has thrown up his career in the Colonial Service (in Ceylon) in the hope of making her his wife. " (P 37)

The war was already in its second year ... Maynard Keynes was working in the Treasury .... (P 55)

... the Woolfs travelled and led an active social life in the midst of Virginia's steady literary output. ... In September 1923 they stayed at Lulworth with Maynard Keynes and the ballet dancer, Lydia Lopokopva, whom he was to marry in the following year."

" A year later, the lease of 29 Fitzroy Square came to an end. Virginia and Adrian took the lease on a four-storeyed house in Brunswick Square (No. 38), and divided it up among themselves and their friends. Maynard Keynes and Duncan Grant, whose lover he had become, share the ground floor, Adrian had the second and Virginia the third; Leonard was now offered a bedroom and sitting-room on the fourth floor. "
(P. 28 Lehmann. Virginia Woolf and her world.)

Colin de la Motte-Sherman