The First Book of Bloomsbury

Abstract

Early in August 1905 there appeared in Cambridge and London an anonymous book of poems entitled Euphrosyne. Its title page described the volume as ‘A Collection of Verse’ published and sold by the Cambridge bookseller Elijah Johnson. Unsigned notices of Euphrosyne were printed in the London Graphic and then in the Cambridge Review, where two pseudonymous correspondents carried on a discussion of the review and the poems for several weeks. After that the volume disappeared from literary history. Some sixty years later, Euphrosyne began to reappear in the footnotes and appendices of Bloomsbury biographies and in the lists of some of the Group’s bibliographies, which noted that Euphrosyne included poems by Clive Bell, Saxon Sydney-Turner, Lytton Strachey, and Leonard Woolf.