Oriental Bloomsbury

Abstract

The multiple and occasionally contradictory response of Bloomsbury to the Orient is the focus of this essay which also considers the reverse: the Orient's response to Bloomsbury and the promotion of their texts in the East. From Roger Fry to G. L. Dickinson, Virginia Woolf, and Vanessa Bell, the Orient became a source of aesthetic interest and problematized politics. French Orientalism and Proust initially corroborated the experiences of Woolf in Constantinople and Leonard Woolf in Ceylon, soon to be revised by new views of Imperial authority. Yet Bloomsbury and the Orient artistically depended on each other, at one point Fry scolding Bloomsbury and England that ‘we can no longer hide behind the Elgin marbles and refuse to look at the art of China’. And look they did, from attending museum shows to collecting Oriental art and furniture, while adopting Oriental fashions – and, when possible, traveling to China and Japan marked by visits by Bertrand Russell, William Empson, and Harold Acton. The response of individual Bloomsbury writers to the Orient mixes curiosity and jealousy. To her nephew Julian Bell, teaching at Wuhan University, Woolf wrote that ‘you are much to be envied. I wish I had spent three years in China at your age’.