Not so many years ago Virginia Woolf and other members of the Bloomsbury group were barely known to the common reader. But the publication of Quentin Bell’s 1972 biography of Woolf stirred a popular and academic interest in these writers that has only grown over time. From academic journals to popular biographies, from photo books to popular art films, Bloomsbury has become big business. Regina Marler treats the Bloomsbury craze with respect and a sense of humor as she charts the growth of the industry and keeps her eye on who is making the profits. Thoroughly researched, filled with great gossip, and fueled by a love of literature Bloomsbury Pie is contemporary scholarship at its best.
—Amazon.com review
Attracted by their pacifism, unconventional behavior, and sexual liberty, the 1960s saw a dramatic rise in interest in the Bloomsbury group, the collection of writers and artists that included Virginia Woolf, Clive Bell, Lytton Strachey, E.M. Forster, and John Maynard Keynes, among others. This popularity has only increased, becoming a mass-market phenomenon that ranges from literary biographies to art production and memorabilia collecting and even to movies such as the recent Carrington (1995). In this delightful and witty book, Marler, who edited the Selected Letters of Vanessa Bell (Pantheon, 1993) and writes and lives in San Francisco, traces the social history of this interest in Bloomsbury, considering both its enthusiasts and its detractors. The result is a work of entertaining scholarship worthy of its subjects. For public and academic libraries where Bloomsbury interest is strong.
—Library Journal
This lively volume recounts the outpouring of masses of paper devoted to what one chronicler later described as, alternatively, “a point of view, a period, a gang of conspirators, or an infectious disease.” Whatever Bloomsbury was, whether Clive Bell’s “shrine of civilization” or D.H. Lawrence’s nest of “black beetles,” it is now an industry–literary, scholarly, artistic, and cultural. Marler, the editor of the Selected Letters of Vanessa Bell (1993), is part of this industry, but she views its history of sensational biographic revelations, disputed literary estates, and academic squabbles with equanimity and wit. Michael Holroyd’s groundbreakingly frank biography of Lytton Strachey (196768) usually gets much of the credit for the Bloomsbury revival after F.R. Leavis’s scorn in Scrutiny and the art world’s dismissal. Marler gives an entertaining account of Holroyd’s determined efforts to penetrate the circle of surviving Bloomsberries after receiving only a 50 advance from his reluctant publisher. She also examines more deliberate strategies of keeping Bloomsbury on the cultural map. Leonard Woolf continued publishing his wife’s writings after her death, always fighting to keep her work available. The shrewd London art dealer Anthony d’Offay stepped in during the declining years of Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell and, with assistance from several of Grant’s protgs, profited handsomely while marketing his work. Quentin Bell, Virginia Woolf’s nephew and first biographer, became the tactful keeper of the Bloomsbury flame, even as American feminists started to present a radical version of his aunt in the 1970s. Marler is particularly sharp on transatlantic differences in the Bloomsbury boom, illuminating the British domestication of the unconventional coterie vs. its American academization in the MLA and assorted archives. A tart but flavorsome recipe for the preserves of Bloomsberries in what Marler accurately describes as “a tenacious and unwieldy cultural phenomenon.”
—Kirkus Reviews