Introduction

Abstract

During what Virginia Woolf called the second chapter of Old Bloomsbury, E. M. Forster published three novels, the last of which established him as a major Edwardian writer. Lytton Strachey became Bloomsbury’s most widely read critic through his anonymous reviews for the Spectator. Woolf herself was beginning to be noticed as a writer in both her unsigned Times Literary Supplement reviews and the signed ones she contributed, for a year, to the Cornhill. Clive Bell began to practise criticism in literary reviews for the prestigious Athenaeum. Desmond MacCarthy started a journal that would publish the best Edwardian essays of Strachey and Roger Fry. Fry left the Metropolitan Museum to become a full-time critic and painter, and J. M. Keynes left the India Office to teach and write economics at Cambridge. In Ceylon, Leonard Woolf became the youngest Assistant Government Agent on the island with responsibility for governing 100,000 people.