Young Bloomsbury: the generation that reimagined love, freedom and self-expression (Hardback)
  • Young Bloomsbury: the generation that reimagined love, freedom and self-expression (Hardback)
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Young Bloomsbury: the generation that reimagined love, freedom and self-expression (Hardback)

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Hardback 352 Pages
Published: 26/05/2022
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Waterstones Says

Casting light on the progressive attitudes of liberation, equality and inclusivity forged by the 1920s incarnation of the Bloomsbury set, Strachey's colourful group biography highlights fascinating figures from novelist Eddy Sackville-West to writer Julia Strachey.

In the 1920s a new generation stepped forward to invigorate the Bloomsbury Group - creative young people who tantalised the original 'Bloomsberries' with their captivating looks and provocative ideas.

Young Bloomsbury introduces us to an extraordinarily colourful cast of characters, including novelist and music critic Eddy Sackville-West, 'who wore elaborate make-up and dressed in satin and black velvet'; sculptor Stephen Tomlin; and writer Julia Strachey. Talented and productive, these larger-than-life figures had high-achieving professional lives and extremely complicated emotional lives.

Bloomsbury had always celebrated sexual equality and freedom in private, feeling that every person had the right to live and love in the way they chose. But as transgressive self-expression became more public, this younger generation gave Old Bloomsbury a new voice. Revealing an aspect of Bloomsbury history not yet explored, Young Bloomsbury celebrates an open way of living that would not be embraced for another hundred years.

Publisher: John Murray Press
ISBN: 9781529306934
Number of pages: 352
Weight: 600 g
Dimensions: 236 x 160 x 38 mm


MEDIA REVIEWS

I want to climb inside this book and live there - PHOEBE WALLER-BRIDGE

This witty, fascinating book is a delight. Read it. - MIRIAM MARGOLYES

This captivating history explores the second generation of queer British writers and artists who pushed the original Bloomsbury Group . . . to live more publicly and go farther creatively - New York Times

Gender fluidity? Pansexuality? Throuples? Chosen families? Cross-dressing? Kinks? How avant-garde - and how old-fashioned. In her colourful Young Bloomsbury Nino Strachey explores a place and time when queer life blossomed - Washington Post

A superb, sparky and reflective book charting the doings of the younger members of the artistic and intellectual coterie - The Spectator

Enjoyably intimate and assured in tone . . . packs far more of an emotional punch than its title might suggest. Nino Strachey's strength as a biographer is to draw sensitive and non-judgemental portraits of people whose private agonies seemed at odds with their outwardly confident appearance. - TLS

Like Lytton Strachey and Michael Holroyd, Ms. Strachey underpins her narrative with concerns from her own time . . . these sections are the most affecting parts of the book . . . It's only a slight exaggeration to say that the story of Bloomsbury is the story of modern literary biography itself - Wall Street Journal

Illuminating . . . Lashings of lust and society larks - Daily Mail

A highly entertaining, pacy volume, based on considerable research, and a must for modern Bloomsbury fans, whether young or old. - Jeremy Musson, Country Life

A lively account of a group of bright young things in the 1920s. A hundred years ahead of their time, these creative souls were pushing the boundaries of gender identity and sexual expression, and - surprisingly - finding acceptance among their friends and families. - ROBERT SACKVILLE-WEST, author of The Searchers: The Quest for the Lost of the First World War

Young Bloomsbury just BRIMS with the same kind of sexy vitality embodied by the characters Nino Strachey describes in such effervescent detail. Just when you might have wondered if there could possibly be room for a new and revealing study of a group of lives which have been so meticulously and extensively documented, Nino's exhilarating lens offers an entirely original and thrilling focus. As scepticism, admiration, envy, and confusion ebb and flow between one chattering, seductive, thinking, inspiring generation and another, this is Gatsby made real. - JULIET NICOLSON

With a deft turn of the Bloomsbury kaleidoscope, and an impressive gift for finding treasures in the archives, Nino Strachey reveals colourful new patterns of experiments in living which speak trenchantly to our own cultural moment. - MARK HUSSEY, author of Clive Bell and the Making of Modernism

Great fun and, for all fans of the Bloomsbury Group, enormously informative - like being transported back to "dancing the night hours away underground in the pitch dark and smoke-filled avant-garde nightclubs of that day", you never know who you're going to meet. - SIMON FENWICK, author of The Crichel Boys

An extraordinary account of the bustling non-binary heart of the literary and artistic roaring twenties, filled with the most vivid characters, who lived and loved under the shadow of the horror of conversion therapy and yet found ways to express themselves so boldly and beautifully. Young Bloomsbury gives new context to the later stages of life for the original Bloomsbury group. I loved every page. - JACK THORNE, BAFTA, Tony and Olivier Award-winning Screenwriter and Playwright

Above all else, Bloomsbury was a liberating force, as Nino Strachey shows in her sparkling new book. The younger friends and relations of the Bells, Stracheys and Woolfs lived, worked and loved freely, finding their own ways to personal and artistic fulfilment. This book is packed with their brilliant, subversive energy - ANNE CHISHOLM, author of Frances Partridge: A Biography

A brisk, light tonic . . . Joyfully transgressive . . . Strachey provides frothy accounts of their gatherings at the Gargoyle; or at the all-male Cranium Club, founded by Bunny Garnett, where sherry was sipped from a skull and conversation permitted only on "abstract and literary subjects"; or in private homes, like Gerald Reitlinger's, at which Lytton Strachey danced with Nancy Mitford, and young men writhed in orgiastic heaps - Harper’s Magazine

The book is a rich, varied world of competing narratives . . . one would struggle to imagine anyone doing each one justice with the skill and finesse that is demonstrated here - James T Bowen, Virginia Woolf Bulletin

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“Fascinating!”

Having been interested by the original Bloomsbury set, this book was a must and it didn’t disappoint!

Hardback edition
Helpful? Upvote 17

“Recommended”

I found it enjoyable and learned something new. Bloomsbury set always fascinated me and I read quite a number of books by those authors.
This was an entertaining and compelling way to learn about the generation.
If... More

Hardback edition
Helpful? Upvote 16

“A must-read!”

A must-read!

Hardback edition
Helpful? Upvote 11

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