“At the Bottom”: Lytton Strachey and the Sodomitical Archive

2019 ◽  
Vol 42 (3) ◽  
pp. 1
Author(s):  
Clarke
Keyword(s):  
Lytton Strachey

Camp Sites: Forster and the Biographies of Queer Bloomsbury

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
George Piggford
Keyword(s):  
Economic Consequences ◽  
Sexual Practices ◽  
Noticeable Effect ◽  
John Maynard Keynes ◽  
Bloomsbury Group ◽  
Psychological Realism ◽  
Queen Victoria ◽  
Lytton Strachey ◽  
Literary Practices ◽  
Old Friends

Members of the Bloomsbury Group wrote biographical texts influenced by the camp style of Lytton Strachey in Eminent Victorians and Queen Victoria. The most noticeable effect of this style is the subversion of Victorian biographical conventions. Stracheyesque qualities can be found in Virginia Woolf’s Orlando and Flush, John Maynard Keynes’ The Economic Consequences of the Peace, Clive Bell’s Old Friends, and E.M. Forster’s early nonfiction sketches and his biographies of Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson and Marianne Thornton. Especially in their biographical writings these figures felt free to emphasize exaggeration, even silliness, in contrast to the psychological realism prevalent in their own and others’ fictional literary experiments. The Stracheyesque note in Bloomsbury biography provides a common quality and arguably queers readers’ expectations of modernist literary practices. As with the pervasive irregularity of their sexual practices, such textual play might be understood as liberatory and subversive.

Virginia Woolf in Greece: “Curious contrasts!”: Hellenism and Englishness

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeanette McVicker
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Common People ◽  
Personal Loss ◽  
Personal Experiences ◽  
Lytton Strachey ◽  
History Of ◽  
Changing Times ◽  
With Memory

A young Virginia Stephen describes the rustic beauty of Salisbury plain and its surroundings (including Stonehenge) in an early voicing of Englishness in the 1903 journal. Three years later, Virginia visits Greece and Turkey, where she begins to contrast that developing sense of Englishness with other nationalisms (German, Greek and Turkish), both resisting and appropriating the language of the tourist. In addition to helping her formulate a sense of national identity, as a woman and a writer, these trips share another aspect: they are suffused by personal experiences of loss (Leslie Stephen’s declining health and death, and Thoby’s sudden death from typhoid). A similar weaving of personal loss with issues of national identity can be detected in her diary during her second journey to Greece in the company of Leonard, Roger and Margery Fry in 1932, prompted by the deaths of Lytton Strachey and Dora Carrington, and her return to the English countryside. This paper explores the relation that these specific journeys, 30 years apart, have to Woolf’s developing sense of tradition, history, and western civilization, and her own place as a writer. The interweaving of the rustic – peasants, common people, villages and natural places – with the history of ideas allows Woolf to reimagine the legacy of heritage for her dramatically changing times. That heritage, intimately bound up with death – whether neutralized as an ancestral past or bearing the sting of the lived present – shapes the way Woolf engages with memory, beauty, and the contemporary role of the English writer.

Cambridge

Leonard Woolf ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 15-29
Author(s):  
Fred Leventhal ◽  
Peter Stansky
Keyword(s):  
Trinity College ◽  
Discussion Group ◽  
Good Friend ◽  
John Maynard Keynes ◽  
Bloomsbury Group ◽  
King's College ◽  
Close Friendships ◽  
Lytton Strachey

Woolf went to Trinity College, Cambridge, to read Classics. There probably the more important part of his education was the close friendships he formed with Lytton Strachey and Clive Bell as well as John Maynard Keynes from King’s College, Cambridge. Leonard, Strachey, and Keynes were all members of the Apostles, a small select secret discussion group, very much under the influence of the philosopher G. E. Moore. This shaped his ideas about politics, art, and the importance of friendship. At Trinity he also became a good friend of Thoby Stephen, brother of Virginia and Vanessa Stephen. Through these friendships the Bloomsbury Group would come into existence some years later. He also began to write, but in the first instance largely poetry.

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