Bloomsbury Group

Intellectual circle of writers and artists based in Bloomsbury, London, which flourished in the 1920s. It centred on the house of publisher Leonard Woolf and his wife, novelist Virginia Woolf. Typically modernist, their innovative artistic contributions represented an important section of the English avant-garde.

The circle included the artists Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell, the biographer Lytton Strachey, art critics Roger Fry and Clive Bell, and the economist John Maynard Keynes. From their emphasis on close interpersonal relationships and their fastidious attitude towards contemporary culture arose many accusations of elitism. They also held sceptical views on social and political conventions and religious practices.