Eminently Queer Victorians and the Bloomsbury Group’s Critique of British Leadership

Abstract

This chapter explores how several members of the Bloomsbury Group critiqued British leadership from the nineteenth century to their own times, in particular John Maynard Keynes and Giles Lytton Strachey. Their critiques were distinctively queer in that they included satirical and sexually nuanced analyses of performances of masculinity by key public figures. The wide impact of certain of their publications gave their personal attitudes and styles an under-recognised influence on inter-war Europe. Such critiques can be related to wider public discourse in which masculine self-assertion on the part of powerful men was not something that was taken at face value. Issues concerning masculinity were essential components of a sophisticated understanding of both the operation and popular reception of high politics in the early twentieth century.