Description
'I wanted to climb inside this book and live there' PHOEBE WALLER-BRIDGE
'This witty, fascinating book is a delight. Read it' MIRIAM MARGOLYES
'Superb, sparky and reflective' The Spectator
'Gender fluidity? Pansexuality? Throuples? Chosen families? Cross-dressing? Kinks? Young Bloomsbury explores a place and time when queer life blossomed' Washington Post
Controversial before the First World War, the Bloomsbury Group became notorious in the 1920s. New members joined their ranks, pushing at boundaries, flouting conventions, and spurring their seniors to new heights of creative activity. Bloomsbury had always celebrated sexual equality and freedom in private, but this younger generation brought their transgressive lifestyles out into the open. Nino Strachey reveals a vivid history surprisingly relevant to our present day.
'One comes away slightly breathless with the sense of having left an excellent party full of wit and intrigue' TLS
'Highly entertaining and pacy, a must for Bloomsbury fans, young or old.' Country Life
About the Author
After studying at Oxford University and the Courtauld Institute, Nino Strachey worked as a curator for the National Trust and English Heritage. Her first book, Rooms of Their Own, explored the homes of three writers linked to the Bloomsbury Group, revealing changing attitudes towards sexuality and gender in the 1920s and 30s. Nino is the last member of the Strachey family to have grown up at Sutton Court in Somerset, home of the Stracheys for over 300 years. She lives in West London with her husband and child, surrounded by the displaced portraits of her Strachey relations. Her relative Lytton was the first of many Stracheys to make their way to Bloomsbury. Follow her on Twitter @NinoStrachey.
Reviews
I want to climb inside this book and live there -- PHOEBE WALLER-BRIDGE
This witty, fascinating book is a delight. Read it. * MIRIAM MARGOLYES *
This captivating history explores the second generation of queer British writers and artists who pushed the original Bloomsbury Group . . . to live more publicly and go farther creatively * New York Times *
Gender fluidity? Pansexuality? Throuples? Chosen families? Cross-dressing? Kinks? How avant-garde - and how old-fashioned. In her colourful Young Bloomsbury Nino Strachey explores a place and time when queer life blossomed * Washington Post *
A superb, sparky and reflective book charting the doings of the younger members of the artistic and intellectual coterie * The Spectator *
Enjoyably intimate and assured in tone . . . packs far more of an emotional punch than its title might suggest. Nino Strachey's strength as a biographer is to draw sensitive and non-judgemental portraits of people whose private agonies seemed at odds with their outwardly confident appearance. * TLS *
Like Lytton Strachey and Michael Holroyd, Ms. Strachey underpins her narrative with concerns from her own time . . . these sections are the most affecting parts of the book . . . It's only a slight exaggeration to say that the story of Bloomsbury is the story of modern literary biography itself * Wall Street Journal *
Illuminating . . . Lashings of lust and society larks * Daily Mail *
A highly entertaining, pacy volume, based on considerable research, and a must for modern Bloomsbury fans, whether young or old. -- Jeremy Musson * Country Life *
A lively account of a group of bright young things in the 1920s. A hundred years ahead of their time, these creative souls were pushing the boundaries of gender identity and sexual expression, and - surprisingly - finding acceptance among their friends and families. * ROBERT SACKVILLE-WEST, author of The Searchers: The Quest for the Lost of the First World War *
Young Bloomsbury just BRIMS with the same kind of sexy vitality embodied by the characters Nino Strachey describes in such effervescent detail. Just when you might have wondered if there could possibly be room for a new and revealing study of a group of lives which have been so meticulously and extensively documented, Nino's exhilarating lens offers an entirely original and thrilling focus. As scepticism, admiration, envy, and confusion ebb and flow between one chattering, seductive, thinking, inspiring generation and another, this is Gatsby made real. * JULIET NICOLSON *
With a deft turn of the Bloomsbury kaleidoscope, and an impressive gift for finding treasures in the archives, Nino Strachey reveals colourful new patterns of experiments in living which speak trenchantly to our own cultural moment. * MARK HUSSEY, author of Clive Bell and the Making of Modernism *
Great fun and, for all fans of the Bloomsbury Group, enormously informative - like being transported back to "dancing the night hours away underground in the pitch dark and smoke-filled avant-garde nightclubs of that day", you never know who you're going to meet. * SIMON FENWICK, author of The Crichel Boys *
An extraordinary account of the bustling non-binary heart of the literary and artistic roaring twenties, filled with the most vivid characters, who lived and loved under the shadow of the horror of conversion therapy and yet found ways to express themselves so boldly and beautifully. Young Bloomsbury gives new context to the later stages of life for the original Bloomsbury group. I loved every page. * JACK THORNE, BAFTA, Tony and Olivier Award-winning Screenwriter and Playwright *
Above all else, Bloomsbury was a liberating force, as Nino Strachey shows in her sparkling new book. The younger friends and relations of the Bells, Stracheys and Woolfs lived, worked and loved freely, finding their own ways to personal and artistic fulfilment. This book is packed with their brilliant, subversive energy * ANNE CHISHOLM, author of Frances Partridge: A Biography *
A brisk, light tonic . . . Joyfully transgressive . . . Strachey provides frothy accounts of their gatherings at the Gargoyle; or at the all-male Cranium Club, founded by Bunny Garnett, where sherry was sipped from a skull and conversation permitted only on "abstract and literary subjects"; or in private homes, like Gerald Reitlinger's, at which Lytton Strachey danced with Nancy Mitford, and young men writhed in orgiastic heaps * Harper's Magazine *
The book is a rich, varied world of competing narratives . . . one would struggle to imagine anyone doing each one justice with the skill and finesse that is demonstrated here * James T Bowen, Virginia Woolf Bulletin *
Book Information
ISBN 9781529306958
Author Nino Strachey
Format Paperback
Page Count 352
Imprint John Murray Publishers Ltd
Publisher John Murray Press
Weight(grams) 272g
Dimensions(mm) 196mm * 128mm * 26mm
