Every few years, a new cultural product — book, film, TV show, opera, ballet — emerges about the Bloomsbury Group, the early-20th century affiliation of artists, writers and thinkers that got its name from the central London neighborhood known for its garden squares.
In a 1973 essay in The New York Review of Books, Elizabeth Hardwick lamented the overexposure of its most prominent members — the “exhaustion” of Virginia Woolf and “the draining” of the writer Lytton Strachey.
“The period, the letters, the houses, the love affairs, the bloodlines,” she writes, “are private anecdotes one is happy to meet once or twice, but not again and again.”Decades later, the Bloomsbury industrial complex is still churning away.
For every invigorating new angle, as in Francesca Wade’s 2020 psychogeographic group biography, “Square Haunting,” it seems like there is an anodyne TV show with a fashionable cast tumbling in and out of each other’s beds, like the 2015 BBC series, “Life in Squares.” Where the choreographer Wayne McGregor’s 2015 ballet trilogy “Woolf Works” entrancingly adapted the writer’s narratives (“Mrs.
Dalloway,” “Orlando,” “The Waves”) to an epic score by Max Richter, “Vita & Virginia” a 2019 biopic about Woolf and her lover, Vita Sackville-West, was a stilted and bloodless account of a famously passionate affair.
Persons:
—, Elizabeth Hardwick, Virginia Woolf, Lytton Strachey, “, ”, Francesca Wade’s, Wayne McGregor’s, “ Woolf, ” entrancingly, Dalloway, ” “, Max Richter, “ Vita, Virginia ”, Woolf, Vita
Organizations:
Bloomsbury Group, New York
Locations:
London, Bloomsbury, ” “ Orlando, Vita Sackville, West