Bloomsbury: Art and Politics 2025

Join Karina Jakubowicz on her popular course on Bloomsbury: Art and Politics

This course explores the work and ideas of the Bloomsbury Group through a fascinating range of texts and sources. We will study the paintings of Vanessa Bell and the fiction of Katherine Mansfield, E. M. Forster, Mulk Raj Anand, Virginia Woolf, and Leonard Woolf.

We will also explore the political questions which concerned members of Bloomsbury throughout the early twentieth century, including feminism, the end of empire, and peace in a post-war landscape. 

There are six sessions running weekly on Fridays, 6.00 to 8.00 pm British time, 21 February to 28 March 2025.

To book: scroll down and click on the image at the bottom of page.

Lecture list

Lecture 1. Bloomsbury and Friendship: E.M. Forster, A Room with a View (1908)
Lecture 2. Bloomsbury and Art: Vanessa Bell
Lecture 3. Bloomsbury, War and Pacifism: Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway (1925)
Lecture 4. Bloomsbury and Empire: Leonard Woolf, The Village in the Jungle (1913)
Lecture 5. Bloomsbury and the Modern Woman: Katherine Mansfield, The Garden Party and Other Stories (1922)
Lecture 6. Bloomsbury and India: Mulk Raj Anand, Selected Short Stories (Penguin India, 2006)

Details of Lectures

Lecture 1. Bloomsbury and Friendship: E.M. Forster, A Room with a View (1908)

We begin the course with this fantastic novel by E.M. Forster, which had an indelible impact on the significance of friendship to the Bloomsbury Group. Using the novel as our focus, we'll consider the Group's philosophy of friendship and discuss to what degree it was the most important (and consistent) of all their philosophies and ideas.

Lecture 2. Bloomsbury and Art: Vanessa Bell

This lecture focuses on the painter Vanessa Bell, looking at her approach to the post-impressionist movement and her designs for the Hogarth Press. We'll consider how she worked in tandem with her sister Virginia Woolf, while also producing many fine artworks in her own right and along her own lines. Reading: Frances Spalding, Vanessa Bell, ch. 8, ‘One Among Three’.

Lecture 3. Bloomsbury, War and Pacifism: Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway (1925)

Many people in the Bloomsbury Group and their wider circle were pacifists during the First World War. This lecture explores some of the pacifist ideas and social contexts – at Charleston, Garsington, and beyond – as a context for reading Virginia Woolf’s great novel of post-war London, Mrs Dalloway (1925).

Lecture 4. Bloomsbury and Empire: Leonard Woolf, The Village in the Jungle (1913)

Members of the Bloomsbury group, like many others in the early 20th century, could see that the European empires were based on injustice and, to a large extent, sustained through oppression and violence. Some, such as Leonard Woolf, who was a Civil Servant in (then) Ceylon, had seen the injustices of empire first-hand and became a lifelong anti-imperialist. We study his sensitive short novel about life in Ceylon in the early twentieth century.

Lecture 5. Bloomsbury and the Modern Woman: Katherine Mansfield, The Garden Party and Other Stories (1922)

New Zealander Katherine Mansfield was something of an outsider amongst the Bloomsbury Group, and among other English social groups, but this made her all the better positioned to explore the role of women in early twentieth century society. The modern, middle-class woman was often an outsider: she had increasing access to public spaces, education, and political autonomy, but this inclusion was partial and often fraught with limitations and risks. In this session we look at Mansfield's short story collection from 1922 and consider her representation of the modern woman and her world.

Please read the whole collection. Stories we will focus on include: ‘The Garden Party’, ‘At the Ball’, ‘Miss Brill’, and ‘Marriage a la Mode’.

Lecture 6. Bloomsbury and India: Mulk Raj Anand, Selected Short Stories

In this session we consider the importance of India to Bloomsbury's philosophies and ideas. By the 1930s, E. M. Forster and Leonard Woolf had written powerful anti-imperialist works that directly challenged British rule in India, but what did the situation look like from the perspective of someone who had grown up there and witnessed the situation first hand? Mulk Raj Anand lived in Peshawar (now in Pakistan) and then moved to Bloomsbury in 1925 where he later worked for the Hogarth Press. His incisive short stories shed a valuable light on Indian politics while also offering powerful glimpses into everyday life.

Set Reading

Please get all these texts, if they are available in your region. We have suggested particular editions, but any decent edition will be fine. Please support independent and local bookshops if you can.

• E.M. Forster, A Room with a View (1908; Penguin Classics, 2000)
• Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway (1925; Oxford World Classics, 2008)
• Katherine Mansfield, The Garden Party and Other Stories (1922; Penguin, 2007) or Mansfield, Collected Stories.
• Mulk Raj Anand, Selected Short Stories (Penguin India, 2006). Please contact us if you can’t get this book.
• Frances Spalding, Vanessa Bell: Portrait of the Bloomsbury Artist (1983; I B Tauris, 2018), ch. 8.
• Leonard Woolf, The Village in the Jungle (1913; Eland, 2005)

Optional Further Reading

Quentin Bell et al., Charleston: A Bloomsbury House and Garden, rev. edn (White Lion Publishing, 2018)
Mark Hussey, Clive Bell and the Making of Modernism (Bloomsbury, 2021)
Victoria Rosner, ed., The Cambridge Companion to the Bloomsbury Group (CUP, 2014)
Susan Sellers, Firebird (novel about Lydia Lopokova and John Maynard Keynes) (EER, 2022)
Frances Spalding, The Bloomsbury Group (National Portrait Gallery, 2013; 2021)
Leonard Woolf, Downhill all the Way (autobiography of the years 1919-1939). This is out of print but second-hand copies are often available. Published by Harvest/HBJ, 1975; Oxford University Press, 1980.

Links

Leonard Woolf talks about the Bloomsbury Group (audio, 10 mins).
National Trust webpage on the Bloomsbury Group.
BBC on John Maynard Keynes and Cezanne’s apples.
Dulwich Picture Gallery short talks on Vanessa Bell.
Charleston website.
King’s College Cambridge website page on E. M. Forster.
Open University website page on Mulk Raj Anand.
Open University website page on Leonard Woolf.
Portraits of Bloomsbury artists and others at the National Portrait Gallery, London.
Vanessa Bell exhibition in Milton Keynes, 19 October 2024 - 23 February 2025.
Portraits of Vanessa Bell at Charleston in Firle, 16 November 2024–23 February 2025.
Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain.
On Virginia Woolf's writing room: article in The Guardian by Hermione Lee (2008).

Recordings

Each lecture will be recorded live and will be available to course participants throughout the course and for a week after it ends. We hope this will be helpful to participants in various time zones, and to those who want to hear the lecture more than once. The seminars are not recorded.

Course fees

£310 full price for 6 sessions (includes £20 booking fee)
£280 discount price for students and CAMcard holders (includes £20 booking fee)

Dates

Fridays, 6-8 pm 21 Feb. 2025 to 28 March 2025 British Time (GMT)

To book, please click on image below.