Young Bloomsbury: the generation that reimagined love, freedom and self-expression

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I was surprised that she gave the young women such short shrift, though, after pages and pages of handsome Oxford and Cambridge men and their gay affairs. What makes this book so unique and special is that the author is a descendant of one of the main members of the group and so tells us a compelling narrative that connects into present day and to their child. I found the sort of contents page that introduced the significant players a useful tool to refer back to as it was occasionally hard to keep track of who was who.

It’s a whirlpool of connections that ends up feeling like a string of rather superficial potted biographies. The 1920s are a fascinating time in Western culture and this book dives deep into what creatives were up to at the time. Lytton Strachey denigrated EM Forster when a novel was successful but when his own book sold that was seemingly ok. Written, of course, by a member of the Strachey family who had access to privately-held documents from family and friends, Nino Strachey brings some more obscure figures into the light of day while also presenting the more familiar figures such as Virginia and Leonard Woolf, Lytton Stratchey, Duncan Grant, Vanessa Bell, E.Young Bloomsbury: The Generation That Reimagined Love, Freedom and Self-expression by Nino Strachey | 9781529306958.

As skepticism, admiration, envy, and confusion ebb and flow between one chattering, seductive, thinking, inspiring generation and another, this is Gatsby made real. This cohort still embraced art and creativity as their predecessors did, but brought new explorations of sexuality, gender norms, polyamory, and freedom of self-expression in all aspects of life. Strachey’s is a relatively fresh perspective and I was particularly fascinated by her survey of queer cultures of the 1920s. Secondly, I only publish reviews of books in the subgenre where I’m best known (queer romcom) if they’re glowing. I’m glad Strachey opted to share the information and stories - especially to show that members of the LGBTQIA+ community have always existed and fought for a place to exist in this world.Great fun and, for all fans of the Bloomsbury Group, enormously informative - like being transported back to ‘dancing the night hours away underground in the pitch dark and smoke-filled avant-garde nightclubs of that day,’ you never know who you're going to meet. Great fun and, for all fans of the Bloomsbury Group, enormously informative - like being transported back to "dancing the night hours away underground in the pitch dark and smoke-filled avant-garde nightclubs of that day", you never know who you're going to meet. Strachey begins though with a rather uninspiring, potted history of the Bloomsbury group, before moving on to the next generation – Stephen Tennant, Eddy Sackville-West, Julia Strachey, Frances Marshall and others.