Introduction

In an oft-quoted 1906 letter to John Maynard Keynes, Lytton Strachey fantasized about a world “about a hundred years hence, when preparations will have been made, and compromises come to,” such that their private correspondence could finally be made public. ¹ When he died, in 1932, most of Bloomsbury seemed to agree with this timeline, with Virginia Woolf noting, in her diary, that they couldn’t be published “for 50 years, if at all.” ² Such revelations—about “buggery,” and about what we might now consider the general queerness of the Bloomsbury Group, and modernism writ large—had to wait, with E. M. Forster’s Maurice, for the nearly mythological “Happier Year” of that novel’s infamous dedication. And while we may now hesitate to claim happiness itself, even as we move ever beyond Strachey’s forecasted “hundred years hence,” few would now hesitate to proclaim modernism’s queerness. As Heather Love once asked, “is queer modernism simply another name for modernism?” ³