Essentially this is a group who, despite their blatant privileges and lust for the finer things in life, ultimately chose to campaign for a fairer future, and liberation for all - even at the disinclination of their family and many peers. It’s very reminiscent of many things I have seen in this generation (though we are generally minus the wealthy parents and class protection also) All of which brings us to the question that kept coming up while reading Strachey’s book. There was something unbelievable about it. It’s hard to describe what caused disbelief, but I wanted to know what privileged or non-privileged others thought of the Bloomsbury set. These were the celebrated “Bright Young Things” about whom so many thought and wrote, yet they were as mentioned seemingly majority homosexual. Men and women. That’s what’s hard to believe. I don’t write the latter out of homophobia or anything of the sort. It’s more with wonder. Was London really this advanced in the 1920s whereby all the culture wars about sexuality that took place in the U.S. in between were leapfrogged? Again, questions. Were the homosexuals of that era at the top of the social heap as Strachey seems to allude, or truly outsiders for living as they did? And if outsiders, why did they shine so bright? I think I’m also a fairly shallow audience when it comes to biography: like Virginia Woolf I’m all about gossip, love affairs, and intimate emotional portraits. And I realise that’s complex because we’re talking about real people who lived real lives and it’s not really my business what they liked to do in bed. Even putting my sordid tastes, though, there’s just so much … vividity to the lives of these people, like when Clive Duncan gets so pissed off at Lytton Strachey he decides to “fire” him as a friend and writes a long letter that he doesn’t, in the end send: It should be a crime to write a book this dull about a group of writers, artists, and intellectuals who sussed vibrancy out of every moment. I have a feeling Lytton Strachey, Virginia Woolf, Duncan Grant and all the other members of the Bloomsbury milieu are spinning in their graves right about now. Anyone who endeavors to write a book that probes the loves and losses of the Bloomsbury group needs to up their game and provide a text as fresh and original as they were, yet Young Bloomsbury is full of yawns when it should be raucous and trenchant. Either Nino Strachey--a relative?--was too close her subjects or not close enough.

Nino enjoys exploring the relationships between people and place, seeing buildings as biography. She has written a chapter on a 19th century female collector for a book on Jewish Country Houses, and has published articles in the Wall Street Journal, Apollo, the Literary Review and Country Life. She loves connecting directly with audiences, and over the last few years has appeared at the Cheltenham, Bath, Edinburgh, Blenheim, Dartington and Charleston Literary Festivals (to name just a few). She has lectured on Bloomsbury in America and Italy, and at museums, universities and historic houses in the UK. Please note: This review may not be reproduced or quoted, in whole or in part, without explicit consent from the author. Reading this was a pretty fun time. Any book in which the central cohort describe themselves as ‘very gay and amorous’ is going to be a winner for me tbh, and this was no exception. O ne comes away slightly breathless with the sense of having left an excellent party full of wit and intrigue’ TLSI have long known of and been interested in the Bloomsbury Group - they are an incredibly well documented, romanticised and, dare I say it, likely overdone in many ways… However, bringing a fresh new lens to the second generation of the group, particularly as written by a direct descendent really reignited this for me. I loved meeting all these individuals chronicled in more detail - and it was astounding to see how many parallels there were between this younger generation, and so many people I know and are friends with now, and the causes they advocate for. There is a really central thread throughout this not only of self-expression, and authentic self, but of the fight for socialism (at one point capitalism is described as “thoroughly despicable”), Labour activism (the reality of class division and the differentiation between card carrying Labour members and those who remained on the fence) , and the ongoing dismissal of the notion of fair dealings between classes as ‘ideological’, and class traitorship. Ring any bells with the current political climate…? Again, none of this is meant as criticism of these people. As a believer once again that libertarianism is the perfect ideology for it being all about freedom to choose, it’s hard not to be drawn to historical figures whose motto was there “was nothing one could not say, nothing that one could not do.” This is how it should be. It’s just that it seems easier to be as one should be when privileged. I found this book disappointing. Like other reviewers here, I had expected that, with the author being a member of the Strachey family, there would be new information and the concept of a second generation of "Bloomsberries" was interesting. Group biographies are a difficult genre to pull off without a very clear central theme which enables the author to deal with chronological complexity and avoid repetition - Francesca Wade's Square Haunting is a good example of a successful group biography. But this book seemed jumbled, repetitive and superficial, with no real sense of the personalities or the milieux in which they existed. And the constant emphasis on the group's sexual exploits was tedious. Was the book unputdownable? That can’t be said, though it may well be unputdownable for those who know the world about which Strachey writes. The chapters were very short, which was great. The problem with the chapters for some will be that they read as gossipy streams of consciousness, and because they do, they don’t support Strachey’s contention that the “collective value” of the individuals she writes about “has been consistently underplayed.” The response here is that Strachey perhaps has a point, that these people were ahead of their time in their view that “every person had the right to live and love in the way they chose,” so why not focus more on their deep belief in freedom over the endless mentions of how Lytton Strachey, Dora Carrington, Stephen Tennant, et al personified polyamorous?

All of which speaks to a level of seriousness in the notables featured in Young Bloomsbury that the book perhaps did not vivify. Strachey makes it more than plain to readers that the Bloomsbury atmosphere was such that you could “say what you liked about sex, art or religion,” and the impression is given of people who are maybe flighty. Which didn’t read right. Even if all of “Young Bloomsbury” hadn’t seen the war, all of this crowd surely knew people very well who had. Men or women regardless of age had seen enormous trouble. How could they not have? It’s a way of suggesting that these were individuals who had much more than “sex, art or religion” on their minds. What was it? And let’s not answer with they were merely trying to forget. What’s awful can’t be forgotten, so what was on their minds when they weren’t “buggering” everything within eyesight? This book is an absolute delight! I had some familiarity with the Bloomsbury group (Virginia Woolf, Cecil Beaton, Duncan Grant, Lytton Strachey, Evelyn Waugh etc.) but this book goes into much more detail about their lives, loves, ability to express themselves freely and be open to all sexual orientations and gender expression. This was a creative and fantastic time and these writers, artists and critics opened up new perspectives and visions that have only recently in the past few decades or so been "revived" of sorts in the US and UK in particular. 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. The book is structured really well -- each chapter focuses on one aspect of culture or their lives. This is a highly informative and enjoyable read. I highly recommend it. You walk in an alley sheltered and comely … your hedges are grown so tall that you know nothing of the sun, save that he falls sometimes perpendicular on your vanity and warms your self-complacency at noon.” Always life will be worth living by those who find in it things which make them feel to the limit of their capacity” The central core of this book is the relationship between the two Bloomsbury generations: the way the elders created a space for acceptance, self-expression, and queerness that allowed the young generation to flourish, and in turn, the younger generation provided novelty and creativity and, y’know, their nubile twenty-something bodies for bonking. In all seriousness, the environment cultivated by the elder Bloomsburys does seem to have been genuinely beneficial—radical, too, in its gender equality (class less so, however, something this book gently elides) and sexual openness, especially in contrast to the repression of the times. And the book itself does its best to honour the queerness of its subjects: there’s frank discussion of polyamory and pansexuality, as well as expressions of gender nonconformity that we might today recognise as reflections of trans or nonbinary identity.What a group! I want to sink myself into their literary output to understand the concepts they were grappling with. Many still a struggle today (femme masculinity, transphobia, female equality). Nino Strachey is an author and historian, with a special interest in hidden or underrepresented heritage. Her books Young Bloomsbury and Rooms of their Own shine new light on the queer history of the Bloomsbury Group, revealing changing attitudes towards gender and sexuality in the 1920s. Young Bloomsbury was published in the UK in May 2022 by John Murray Press, and in the US on 6th December 2022 by Atria Books. Controversial before the First World War, the Bloomsbury Group became notorious in the 1920s. New members joined their ranks, pushing at boundaries, flouting conventions, and spurring their seniors to new heights of creative activity. Bloomsbury had always celebrated sexual equality and freedom in private, but this younger generation brought their transgressive lifestyles out into the open. Nino Strachey reveals a vivid history surprisingly relevant to our present day. The Bloomsbury Group was renowned for its wit, and this is completely devoid of it. This provides a thumbnail sketch of the group and the young ones that came along. Given the author's relationship to the group one can't expect that this will be a balanced view, and that is especially revealed when she writes about John Strachey.

For now, the fact that homosexuality wasn’t a legal way of life had me wondering if memories of 100 years ago are grander than the life itself. Weren’t these individuals running scared? In any case, Young Bloomsbury is a well-meaning but ultimately—for me—fairly surface-level romp through the younger Bloomsbury generation that, through what feels like a misplaced desire to be comprehensive, ends up whisking the reader past nearly everything that makes this particular group of people fascinating even a century later.Interestingly, the only negative, and dare I say bitchy, comments all come via quotes attributed to Virginia Woolf, which unfortunately lead me to believe the author is clearly not a fan. The book concludes that the Bloomsbury's were the first to have non-conventional relationships, but that simply ignores pioneers such as Edward Carpenter. (Lived openly with George Merrill for 30 years and was very influential).

Having read this, I feel it will be of more interest to those who haven’t, perhaps, read as many books about the Bloomsbury group as I have. Of course, author Nino Strachey is a relative of Lytton Strachey, one of the ‘Old Bloomsbury’ set and so I had hoped for some real insights and unseen material. The idea behind this title being that the emphasis will not be on Virginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant, etc. but on the ‘Young Bloomsbury’ set that followed them and were inspired by their flouting of conventions and open conversation. Seen by many at the time as smug and self-absorbed, they were followed by the ‘Bright Young Things’ of the Twenties, who were impressed and encouraged to be open about their sexuality by the generation of writers and artists who preceded them. Gender fluidity? Pansexuality? Throuples? Chosen families? Cross-dressing? Kinks? Young Bloomsbury explores a place and time when queer life blossomed’ Washington Post And now my TBR list has a slew of new authors: some previously unknown, some I've dabbled in but must now commit to reading and some I know only by literary reputation.In the years before the First World War, a collection of writers and artists—Virginia Woolf, E.M. Forster, and Lytton Strachey among them—began to make a name for themselves in England and America for their irreverent spirit and provocative works of literature, art, and criticism. They called themselves the Bloomsbury Group and by the 1920s, they were at the height of their influence. They once again believed deeply, but they also could believe deeply in what at times rejected societal norms. Author Strachey notes that Lytton, after having been denied objector status for WWI, showed up to the draft tribunal and offered “to interpose his body between his sister and the German if a soldier attempted to rape her.” He “was then rejected on grounds of ill health.” About this story, it’s possible I read it wrong, but as I see it only a well-born type could have and would have so blatantly revealed his sexual orientation in this way in the first fifth of the 1900s. Unfortunately, my knowledge and interest in art is so minuscule as to have been detrimental in my understanding of several Bloomsbury figures. I shall educate myself forthwith. An “illuminating” ( Daily Mail , London) exploration of the second generation of the iconic Bloomsbury Group who inspired their elders to new heights of creativity and passion while also pushing the boundaries of sexual freedom and gender norms in 1920s England.