Review: 'Young Bloomsbury,' by Nino Strachey

In keeping with the tradition of Quentin Bell, who wrote a biography of his aunt Virginia Woolf, Nino Strachey dives into the milieu of her estimable namesake in "Young Bloomsbury," which aims to provide a necessary corrective to conventional notions behind one of the most celebrated groups of the early 20th century.

Typically, the members most associated with the Bloomsbury Group — a collection of artists and intellectuals who lived and worked in the titular district of London — are Woolf, her husband, Leonard, biographer Lytton Strachey, novelist E.M. Forster, painters Vanessa Bell (Woolf's sister) and Duncan Grant, economist John Maynard Keyes, art critic Roger Fry, et al, but Strachey focuses on "the postwar generation" of "unconventional younger figures who invigorated the aging 'Bloomsberries' with their captivating looks and provocative ideas."

This includes sculptor Stephen "Tommy" Tomlin, whose busts of Woolf and Strachey and Grant still prominently reside in institutions like the Tate and the National Portrait Gallery; novelist Julia Strachey, Lytton's niece and Tomlin's onetime spouse, who wrote the underrated novella "Cheerful Weather for the Wedding"; writer Eddy Sackville-West, cousin of Vita Sackville-West (Virginia Woolf's lover and the inspiration for "Orlando"), who was, like his cousin, "happy to challenge gender conventions"; and John Strachey, one of the rare out-and-out politicians of the group.

Usually relegated to the margins of works about the more famous members, the "Bright Young Things" get their time on center stage.

Besides the makeup of the membership, Strachey also seeks to give the Bloomsbury set credit for establishing "an open way of living that would not be embraced for another hundred years." The conventions of "faith, fidelity, heterosexuality, and patriotism had all been rejected," which in contemporary parlance can be rephrased: Bloomsbury was a queer, ethically non-monogamous, gender nonconforming art collective.

As Strachey notes, "Descriptive language changes slowly over time, gradually catching up with subtle changes in human behavior." Bloomsbury, in other words, didn't have the vocabulary to define themselves at the time. And neither would the generations that immediately followed: Strachey argues that the conservatism of subsequent decades mischaracterized Bloomsbury as a messy "tangle of sexual relationships" and weren't "appreciative of the human benefit."

"Young Bloomsbury" is much more effective as an argument for Bloomsbury's ahead-of-its-time embracement of LGBTQ lives than it is as a narrative with a cohesive arch. Though her prose is deft and engaging, and though, too, her being a member of the Strachey clan allowed her access to her family of "inveterate hoarders," the book is surprisingly brief, summarily moving through many years and numerous protagonists in short sections.

Considering the complexities of its themes, the veritable cornucopia of quirky characters at its disposal, and the unique access of its author, "Young Bloomsbury" could have been much longer and more in depth. For instance, the Memoir Club, one of the intellectual clubs that allowed women, and Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell's "evenings," which began to include the younger generation, are given a shared chapter of just six pages, when an entire book could be written on the subjects (as, in fact, S.P. Rosenbaum did about the Memoir Club).

"Young Bloomsbury"'s biggest flaw is that it introduces a fascinating array of characters and a convincing thesis from an inside source but moves too swiftly to blossom into a portrait worthy of its subject.

Jonathan Russell Clark is the author of "Skateboard" and "An Oasis of Horror in a Desert of Boredom."

Young Bloomsbury

By: Nino Strachey.

Publisher: Atria, 304 pages, $29.