Virginia Woolf as Policy Analyst

Abstract

The collection of friends known as the Bloomsbury Group has been described variously as a ‘school’, a ‘set’, a ‘clique’, a ‘coterie’ and in other less complimentary terms. There was difference of opinion within the Group over who the members were, and even over whether it existed. The hard core of the Group comprised Lytton Strachey, Leonard and Virginia Woolf, Clive and Vanessa Bell, John Maynard Keynes, Desmond McCarthy, Roger Fry, E. M. Forster, Duncan Grant and Saxon SydneyTurner. Others often included are Dora Carrington, David and Angelica Garnett, Quentin Bell and Frances Partridge. Some observers have seen the Group as simply an extension of the ‘Apostles’, the secret society to which several of the original male members belonged while at Cambridge, and where they rejoiced in profound discussions of such topics as truth, beauty and love.1 Some have tended to think of the Group as mainly a pleasant environment in which brilliant and creative people could relax away from engagement with the activities for which they are individually well-known: the writing of novels, the construction of economic theory, the painting of pictures and literary criticism.2 It may be useful to think of Bloomsbury in still another way as something like a ‘think tank’, people gathered together, in part at least to examine and propose solutions to demanding problems of the day.