Dora Lytton Ralph Frances

• Published in: The Gay & lesbian review worldwide 2023, Vol.30 (1), p.25-27
• Main Author: Holleran, Andrew
• Format: Review
• Language: English
• Subjects: Conscientious objectors; Forster, E M (1879-1970); Keynes, John Maynard (1883-1946); Novels; Sexes; Society; Woolf, Virginia (1882-1941); World War I
• ISSN: 1532-1118

Sex, of course, is one of the reasons Bloomsbury has been written about so much; though one may, reading this personal, intimate, anecdotal book, have to google occasionally to identify the individuals being discussed in the roundelay. The first is that there were two Bloomsburys: the one that began in 1906 at Cambridge University when John Maynard Keynes, the eminent economist, and Lytton Strachey founded a discussion society called The Apostles, in which great minds talked about ideas with handsome young undergraduates; and the one that resumed after World War I, when a new generation (who were part of, but not co-extensive with, the "Bright Young Things") emerged. The most famous members of Old Bloomsbury were Woolf (To The Lighthouse, Orlando, A Room of One's Own), Keynes (The Economic Consequences of the Peace), Lytton Strachey (Eminent Victorians), and E. M. Forster (Where Angels Fear to Tread, Maurice). Lytton made a home for himself at Ham Spray (where do they get these names?) with the apparently heterosexual artist Dora Carrington in a platonic marriage of sorts, during which both of them sometimes had sex with the same young man.