Hiatus: 1922–1928

Abstract

For some six years the Memoir Club appears dormant: no allusions by members to the Club are recorded, no accounts of meetings are to be found, no Club memoirs of the period exist. It was, however, a prolific period of writing by Club members, including fiction, criticism, and a variety of published and unpublished autobiographical work that is germane to the Memoir Club’s history. There were autobiographical novels and critical essays on autobiography by Virginia Woolf, who had moved back to Bloomsbury with Leonard in 1924. Private memoirs of grief were written by both Roger Fry and E. M. Forster. Forster’s memoir belongs with his Egyptian writings, but is not unconnected to the Indian novel he finally finished in 1924. A book of Forster’s Egyptian pieces was published in 1923 by the Hogarth Press, which also, during this period, published books by Roger Fry, Clive Bell, Mary Hutchinson, Maynard Keynes, and Molly MacCarthy as well as works by two ancestors: Leslie Stephen’s late Some Early Impressions and Julia Margaret Cameron’s Victorian Photographs of Famous Men and Fair Women, introduced by both Virginia Woolf and Roger Fry.