David Herman
The Bloomsbury Group
Summary
Having a huge impact on British art and literature, the Bloomsbury Group included such famous figures as Virginia Woolf, E.M. Forster, Maynard Keynes and Lytton Strachey. But in recent years some of the key figures, Virginia Woolf, in particular, have come under fire for their antisemitic views. How will their reputations survive?
David Herman
David Herman is a freelance writer based in London. Over the past 20 years he has written almost a thousand articles, essays, and reviews on Jewish history and literature for publications including the Jewish Chronicle, the Jewish Quarterly, Jewish Renaissance, the Guardian, the New Statesman, and Prospect. He has taught courses on Jewish culture for the London Jewish Cultural Centre and JW3. He is a regular contributor to Jewish Book Week, the Association of Jewish Refugees, and the Insiders/Outsiders Festival on the contribution of Jewish refugees to British culture.
Arlene, that’s a fantastically good question. And why on earth did she? I have absolutely no answer. And do you know, even more puzzling, I’ve never seen anyone else ask that question. It’s a brilliant question. Why did she? I mean, Leonard was a very cultured, very smart man. He was a very close friend of a number of the Cambridge undergraduates who frequented her home in Bloomsbury after they graduated. So he was part of a very close intimate circle. He was the only Jew among them, apart from Gertler and Koteliansky. Koteliansky was a refugee, Gertler was a Jewish immigrant from the East End. So Leonard Woolf had a very different background. He was sort of middle class. He was not as posh as the Bells, as Stephens, or as some of the other, the Stracheys. But nevertheless, he’d gone to Cambridge. He was from a different kind of cultural group from Mark Gertler and Samuel Koteliansky. He was very smart. He was a very interesting and cultured man. I don’t know if that answers the question.
It seems not. But as I say, there were two sides to this, Janet. You know, she was a famous writer. She was a great writer. It allowed him to be part of a kind of fascinating, cultural world, the most exclusive and exciting cultural group in England at that time. And that he knew many of these people very well. He’d been at Cambridge with many of them. He’d been very close friends with many of them. And it was through them, through Thoby, the brother who died in 1906, that he met the sisters Vanessa and Virginia and then entered this exciting new social world. This liberated, emancipated, very exciting world compared to what most Edwardian homes were like. I don’t know if you remember John Gielgud’s wonderful performance as the father of Charles Ryder in “Brideshead Revisited.” Incredibly captures brilliantly the sense of how stuffy English middle class life could be. And Bernard Shaw, the young heroine in that Bernard quotation captures brilliantly how terribly oppressive it was for young women and also, in different ways, for young men. So, you know, these were exciting new times and exciting new people. And so perhaps he sort of weighed that up in some way.
My God, Leon, you’ve really put the cat among the pigeons there. I couldn’t possibly say. And I don’t know any, I’ve never known any self-hating Jews. I know there are sort of classic figure in cultural thinking. I’m afraid to say I’ve never known any, so I really can’t bring anything to contribute to this.