Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group in the Literary 1920s (Hardback)

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I love Virginia Woolf and wrote about her in my dissertation so this was a wonderful book to learn more and explore the rest of the Bloomsbury group more. So interesting and well written.

NetGalley, Holly Marlow

Rating: 5 out of 5 stars

This is a brilliantly written look at Virginia Woolf and the friends she surrounded herself with during the 1920's. And with those friends often being highly successful in their own rights, it's a fascinating insight into some of the most talented people still remembered to this day. Their lives read like soap operas at times, so there's never a dull moment throughout this whole book!

Obviously centred around Virginia and her life and struggles, the book also features those in her inner circle from TS Eliot, E.M.Forster, Duncan Grant and more so there's a great insight too into their personalities, their careers and the history of the time with what was going on in the world which gives you a better understanding of the times they were living in.

Their lives were never dull - they partied, they worked hard, they bickered, they struggled with illnesses and mental health - and I really loved the flow of how their stories were told over the years from when they met at University to the end of the 1920's. It chops and changes brilliantly between each name as they found themselves facing successes or challenging times and it's given me a better understanding of each of them as a person and you can see why they were drawn to each other. It's also bought new names to me to go and read more about as I'm now interested in their work! Highly recommended!

NetGalley, karen mace

Rating: 5 out of 5 stars

This was a fantastic, dishy read about all the complicated mess of relationships that made up the Bloomsbury Group. Was there ever a group of people more creatively talented?? And more involved in each other's business? Perhaps Lord Byron's crew might be competition. It's wild to read that these people lived 100 years ago. Their lives are curiously modern. I recommend it to anyone interested in British culture and society in the interwar years.

NetGalley, Ana Palmer

Rating: 5 out of 5 stars

I knew a decent amount about this Group (and A LOT about some of these folks) on the way in, but I learned a lot of new information through this read and found it compelling from cover to cover. Again, this isn't a casual, chill read for the beach, but for the target audience, this is a real banger.

NetGalley, Sacha Moore

Recommended for readers who enjoy biographical books that aren't about a single person, as well as readers who want a better grasp of how this particular group influenced their society and culture and thus influenced our own.

NetGalley, Miles Landry

Great historical research. I enjoyed this and liked the context setting of what else was going on in the world and particularly the Uk in each year. Thank you to the author for the research and a very readable book.

NetGalley, Debbie Jaggers

This book offers an engaging exploration of Virginia Woolf and her circle during the 1920s. Organized by year, it provides a clear, chronological look at the lives and works of Woolf, Vanessa and Clive Bell, Duncan Grant, E.M. Forster, and other key figures, making the history easy to follow. The author presents well-researched insights in a readable style, offering plenty of new details about the group’s personal and professional dynamics. A great choice for anyone interested in Woolf, the Bloomsbury circle, or the literary culture of the 1920s.

NetGalley, Megan Clark

Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group in the Literary 1920s by Kathleen Dixon Donnelly is a great non-fiction novel for anyone in the literary world! There is so much to love about this novel and how it was written.

The structure was perfect for non-fiction; it was incredibly easy to navigate the story being told. The author had small sections in the beginning to explain who each member of the Bloomsbury Group was. From there on out, it was sectioned out by year. I loved this structure because I could feel the story and facts unravelling smoothly.

The author clearly did her research. A lot of the information was new to me, and the author gave it in a digestible, academic way. I loved every second of it.

If you have even the slightest interest in Virginia Woolf, the Bloomsbury Group, literature, history, or the literature scene in the 1920s, I highly recommend this non-fiction novel! I picked it up because I am a fan of Virginia Woolf and 1920s literature, and I was not disappointed.

NetGalley, Madeline Church

I found it very readable, with plenty of new (to me) information, and it has inspired me to get to more of their works. I wish I had been able to read it before the exhibition of Vanessa Bell's earlier this year, as I would have liked to have gone to that. I will keep my eye out for more by them after reading this.

NetGalley, Tania Peaecy

Rating: 5 out of 5 stars

Who's afraid of Virginia Woolf? Well, I'm not, but I must admit I've always found her books such as Mrs Dalloway and To The Lighthouse very difficult (I got on better with Orlando, perhaps because of the Tilda Swinton film).
Despite this, I thoroughly enjoyed this summary of her life and that of the Bloomsbury set which mainly focuses on the 1920s. The group were basically a bunch of well-to-do clever dicks who spent all their time writing and publishing each other's books and poems, throwing parties for each other, painting portraits of or having affairs with each other in the years between the wars. Virginia, when not depressed, would typically write a stream of consciousness book, with the cover illustrated by her sister, the artist, Vanessa Bell, then write a letter to E.M Forster, who would be in India getting material for his next book, before rounding off her day by trying and failing to read James Joyce's Ulysses, and then renewing her affair with Vita Sackville-West.
With are lots of people here doing many different things, there's quite a lot of ground to cover here. Two characters I did enjoy were the economist, John Maynard Keynes and his relationship with his ultimate life partner, the glamorous ballerina, Lydia Lopokova. The Bloomsbury group seems to have been dreadfully snobby to her, largely because she was of foreign extraction, which is a shame because she comes across better than anyone in the entire book. Other characters (Ernest Hemingway, George Orwell and Picasso) have only small parts in the unfolding drama and Donnelly keeps the reader neatly updated as to what was going on in the wider world throughout. A good read and overall probably more fun than your average Virginia Woolf novel.

NetGalley, Chris Hallam