Virginia, There is No Bloomsbury

Bloomsbury is a part of London, not an idea, and certainly not a group, according to scholar Peter F. Alexander in his study, “Leonard and Virginia Woolf: A Literary Partnership” (St. Martin’s: $29.95; 265 pp.). There is no such thing as the Bloomsbury group, such as we have come to know a very loosely connected circle of writers, publishers and artists (some of whom could barely tolerate each other) living and producing in the first half of 20th-Century England. An entire publishing industry has been based on a misnomer.

Though “Leonard and Virginia Woolf: A Literary Partnership” is much more informative and entertaining than your typical scholarly exercise, Alexander fails to convince that Bloomsbury did not exist. He doth protest too much. Associates, relatives and children of the original writers and artists in question have written memoirs and biographies that make free use of the name. Nigel Nicolson referred to his parents’ friends and acquaintences as members of the Bloomsbury group.) How important can this argument be? It boils down to an academic storm-in-a-teacup. Did Bloomsbury exist? (It could be noted, for example, that Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley and Keats didn’t belong to a chartered organization called the Romantics, but the term stuck.) A communal creative energy was sparked among a certain set of people who wrote, painted, slept together, argued, made enough of a mark to be noticed as a movement of sorts. Label them what you like.

Alexander’s second argument--that Virginia Woolf is “not Shakespeare--nor even Tolstoy, Balzac or Joyce”--is more convincing. He’s trying to assess the Woolfs’ literary reputations and place them in a more realistic context. He is correct in pointing out that perhaps Virginia Woolf’s entire reputation could rest on “To the Lighthouse” and “The Waves.”

While Alexander describes his little book as anti-Bloomsbury, where else can you store it on the bookshelf other than beside the rest of the “Bloomsbury” titles in your library? Or, if you buy Alexander’s argument, whatever you choose to call those books now.