SOURCE: Rosenberg, Beth Carole. “The Boomsbury Group.” In Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism, Vol. 138, edited by Allison Marion and Linda Pavlovski. Farmington Hills, Mich.: The Gale Group, 2002.

In following original essay, Rosenberg provides an overview of the Bloomsbury Group, focusing on its history, representative writers, hallmark works, and critical response.

Overview

Bloomsbury is a district in the center of London that includes the British Museum; Bernard Street; and Bedford, Brunswick, Gordon, Russell, Tavistock, and Woburn Squares. It is also the name given to a group of friends who lived in and around that neighborhood during the first part of the twentieth century. They were born during the last three decades of the nineteenth century and were, therefore, raised in the conservative and repressed Victorian culture. As children often tend to rebel against their parents to establish their own identities, however, the Bloomsbury Group rejected the strictures of the Victorian period...