ABSTRACT
Bloomsbury came about in 1904, when, after the death of their father, the prominent critic and writer Leslie Stephen, Vanessa, Virginia, Thoby, and Adrian Stephen moved to forty-six Gordon square in Bloomsbury, London. In 1905, they started hosting Thursday and Friday evening gatherings at their new lodgings, attended by many of the Stephens’ Cambridge friends. Bloomsbury has come to mean many things to many people; as Richard Shone said, Received notions of Bloomsbury, friendly ones as well as hostile, invariably wilt under close inspection: personal prejudice makes do for historical accuracy and the word Bloomsbury is tossed about, proteiform on a sea of misapprehension, assuming whatever shape and colour suits the writer’s own agenda. In her essay “Intellectual Crossings and Reception,” Brenda R. Silver points out how the claim of Bloomsbury artists as public intellectuals was largely undermined by critics after the Second World War.
