The Bloomsbury Group was an intellectual and artistic outlet. Familiar names such as Virginia and Leonard Woolf, Vanessa Bell, Clive Bell, and Lytton Strachey, represent this group of friends whose personal relationships were founded in a mutual passion for artistic expression and challenging society's norms. Their relationships, though very personal, are made public through the immortality of their writings, paintings, and letters. The Bloomsbury letters are in a distinct catergory. The letters, particulary those by Virginia Woolf and Lytton Strachey, contain a novelistic flair that deserves mention. To highlight the distinct qualities of Woolf and Strachey's letter to one another, I have conducted a brief outline of two letters. The first letter is from Strachey to Woolf and the second letter is Woolf's response.
The Chestnuts,
East Ilsley,
Berks.
Friday Nov. 8th 1912
I saw you for such as short time the other day: it was tantalizing. I should like to see you every day for hours. I have always wanted to. Why is it impossible? Why is everything that is satisfactory in this life impregnated with unsatisfactoriness? Alack! (as Mrs. Humphrey Ward’s characters all say—have you noticed it?) Why is London the only place to live in, and why must one have the strength of a cart-horse, or you, to be able to manage it? You are not to suppose from this that I am unhappy here. No, my hours pass in such a floating stream of purely self-regarding comfort that that’s impossible, only one does have regrets….Will you at any rate write to me? I hardly think so. You always say you love writing letters but you never do it. The inconsistency of you sex, I suppose. Yours would be more smoothing to read than George Meredith’s. What do you think? I opened that volume just before I left Belsize yesterday, and was so nauseated by the few sentences that met my eye that I shut it up, put it down, and deliberately left it behind, so if you want it you must ask them to send it you. Nothing will induce me to read another word the man wrote.
Is it prejudice, do you think that makes us hate the Victorians, or is it the truth of the case? They seem to me a set of mouthing bungling hypocrites; but perhaps really there is a baroque charm about them which will be discovered by our great-great-grandchildren, as we have discovered the charm of Donne, who seemed intolerable to the 18th century. Only I don’t believe it. Thackeray and G. Meredith will go the way of Calprenède & Scudéry; they’ll be curious relics in 50 years. I should like to live for another 200 years (to be moderate). The literature of the future will, I clearly see, be amazing. At last it’ll tell the truth, and be indecent, and amusing, and romantic, and even (after about 100 years) be written well. Quelle joie!—To live in those days when books will pour out from the press reeking with all the filth of Petronius, all the frenzy of Dostoievsky, all the romance of the Arabian Nights, and all the exquisiteness of Voltaire! But it won’t only be the books that will be charming then.—The people!—The young men!...even the young women!...—But these vistas are too exacerbating.—
I’ve spent today trying to write in an unemphatic and yet forceful manner for the Edinburgh. It’s very difficult. How, oh how, do you avoid periods? My paragraphs will all wind themselves up to a crisis, and come down with a thump—it’s most distressing. I believe there’s some trick for getting round it, which I should be glad if you’ld tell me. Horace Walpole seems to avoid it. It’s some sort of whisk of the tail that one has to give but if one hasn’t a tail to whisk?—
Tell Leonard that I wrote a wild letter to his brothers the other day, and have had no answer. Are they enraged?
Also, talking of Victorians, did I enrage you by my rather curt remarks on ton père? I meant to imply the necessary reservations, but I’m afraid I didn’t. Of course I think qua man divine.
Your
Lytton
13 Cliffords Inn
Nov. 16 [1912]
Really, if you go on writing, you will vitiate John Bailey’s stock phrase “the art of letter writing is dying out—“Of course my objection to letters is that they were all written in the 18th Century, an age I find unlovable. Still, there seems no reason why we shouldn’t write letters ever upon the 16th of
November—anyhow why you shouldn’t. Of course for a wife and a woman the case is different. Do the race horses champ beneath you? I dreamt of race horses all night which is partly why I take up the pen—when I ought to be reading and reviewing. Isn’t it damnable to have begun that again? And yet it’s rather inspiriting.
I feel like a child switching off the heads of poppies—it’s such a joke now, writing reviews, and I once took it seriously. Poor old Desmond was here again yesterday, with his dispatch box in which was a half-written review of George Trevelyan’s edition of Meredith’s poetry—Out it came and we went through it with a pencil. “Now please suggest some alternative for ‘reveling in romance’—I don’t like ‘revelling in romance’—‘exalting in magnificence?’ No—that’s not quite it—However, let’s go on.” On we went, defining youth, poetry and what precisely is meant by optimism. It was awfully gloomy—this poor man searching about in the roots of things at 2 guineas a column, and sweating and grunting and saying “If I had time, of course, I could do something better than this” and yet it was stiff with thought. He seemed to me altogether dismal. Starting for Biarritz where he is to help Paley with a book on Political Economy. The kind of thing they debate is whether to call Disraeli Lord Beaconsfield, the late Mr. Disraeli, or Disraeli pure and simple, which Desmond advises, provided the sentence will stand it. Our great event has been that Arnold has taken Leonard’s novel with great praise. Of course he makes it a condition that certain passages are to go out—which, we don’t yet know. It’s triumphant to have made a complete outsider believe in one’s figments. I don’t suppose I altogether agree about the 19th century. It’s a good deal hotter in the head than the 18th. But you didn’t shock my feelings as a daughter. The difference probably is that I attach more importance to his divinity “qua man” even in his books than you do. It always seems to me to count considerably. But my feeling for literature is by no means pure.
Ottoline has been seen by several observers—not by me—passing through on her way South again, the gold streamers pendent from each ear, and trailing on the ground, amid a myriad of pointed foxes tails—So Leonard, who’s not given to exaggeration, describes her. We are sitting over the fire, in complete quiet, save for an occasional van down Fetter Lane—L. Half way through an immense Blue Book on Divorce, upon which he has to write an article for that oozing officious man, Haynes.
London is Very nice—a trifle to rackety I agree—but we are off, thank God, tomorrow to Asheham, where we shall discuss the shepherd’s morals—he’s had a child at 60, and this gives rise to talk with Mrs. Funnell.
Yr.
V. W.
Is this letter written upon Bumf? It looks like it. Isn’t it a shame that Marjorie is not going to be a publisher? We urged it all we could.
The bold parts of the letters highligt the features of Bloomsbury letters that I discovered from my research. The features are presented in the order they appear in the text:
-INTERPRETATION DEPENDS ON THE THE TONE: The beginning of the letter could be misconstrued as having possible sexual connotations, but because we know it is Lytton Strachey the tone of the letter is not sexual but playful
-ARGUMENT: Lytton Strachey uses detail and description to explain why he dislikes Victorians
-COMPLEX LINGUISTIC CONFIGURATION SUCH AS SIMILES: Virginia Woolf's comparison of writing reviews to be like a child switching off heads of poppies
-USE OF PERSONAL CONVERSATIONS: Mainly characterized in Virginia's letters. In this case she uses a conversation she has had with Desmond McCarthy (a Bloomsbury writer)
-PRESENTATION OF CHARACTERS, DESCRIPTION, AND HUMOR: All these aspects are featured in her description of Lady Ottoline and her dress
