Because whenever they wrote the members of Bloomsbury tried to write well, there is an abundant variety of illuminating and delightful reading to be found in the shorter prose works of the Group's novelists, biographers, critics, and even political economists. In
A Bloomsbury Group Reader Professor Rosenbaum offers a representative selection of such writings by Virginia Woolf, E. M. Forster, Lytton Strachey, Roger Fry, Desmond MacCarthy, Clive Bell, Leonard Woolf, John Maynard Keynes, and Vanessa Bell. His Focus in this selection is not upon the lives of the Group but upon what finally must justify our interest in them: their work, in this instance, as writers.
Bloomsbury writers particularly enjoyed the modernist mixing of forms, combining fact with fiction, polemics with aesthetics, humour with history. The pieces in this collection have therefore been arranged according to their genre and are complete in themselves, though some are parts of larger works. They pass from the objective to the subjective - from genres in which the writer's presence is least felt in the work to those in which it may be dominant. The sequence from stories, biographies, and essays through reviews, polemics, and talks to travel writings and memoirs is framed by the forewords and afterwords written for some of Bloomsbury's books.
Several familiar texts, such as E. M. Forster's 'What I Believe' or Virginia Woolf's 'Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown', have been included here, but many others are far well known. Virginia Woolf's biography of her great aunt, for example, has not yet been collected. While Desmond MacCarthy's introduction to the First Post-Impressionist Exhibition catalogue and Leonard Woolf's very early review of Freud are believed never to have been previously reprinted.
