Introduction

Abstract

Once again it was Virginia Woolf, who, looking back from a 1920 Memoir Club paper entitled ‘Old Bloomsbury’, divided the early history of the Group into two ‘chapters’ (MB, p. 195). The first ended with the death of Thoby Stephen in November 1906; the second began with the marriage of Vanessa and Clive Bell a few months later and concluded with the first post-impressionist exhibition in December 1910. The Earlier and Later Parts of Edwardian Bloomsbury correspond to these two chapters. A further chapter of Old Bloomsbury, referred to by Woolf, closed with the First World War. It belongs to the literary period she called Georgian.