This chapter examines how the friendships, loves, jealousies, anecdotes, and conversations of the Bloomsbury members, recorded in various auto/biographical sources, have been dramatized and novelized in several contemporary bioplays and biographical novels: Bloomsbury: A Play in Two Acts (1974) by Peter Luke; But Nobody Lives in Bloomsbury (2006) by Gillian Freeman; Vanessa and Virginia (2008) by Susan Sellers; and Vanessa and Her Sister (2014) by Priya Parmar. The chapter focuses more particularly on the character of Virginia, who plays a crucial role in the intellectual and emotional dynamics of the group, and analyzes her interactions with her friends, especially Lytton, and her relationships with her family members, especially Vanessa. These posthumous literary representations of the iconic author raise questions about the resurrection and transposition of the historical figure in fiction and drama, as well as about updating and recycling her literary heritage for today’s readers and spectators.

By providing an overview of the varied shorter fictions produced by key Bloomsbury group members, this essay touches on some significant short fiction writers among its outer circles. Virginia Woolf’s shorter fiction features prominently; the chapter conveys the volume and variety of the short fictions that she produced – though rarely published – during her lifetime. It also gives due attention to Woolf’s husband Leonard’s overlooked experiments with fiction, including his “Three Jews,” which was published with Virginia’s “The Mark on the Wall” as Two Stories (1917), their Hogarth Press’ first publication. Within E. M. Forster’s significant short fiction output, particular attention is paid to works published – like his radical novel of homosexual awakening Maurice – after his death. The chapter takes in some early stories by Mulk Raj Anand, the prolific Indian writer associated with Bloomsbury through Forster, and gives a flavor of the enormous variety in lesser known stories by core group members such as Desmond MacCarthy, David Garnett, and Lytton Strachey – encompassing ghost stories, speculative queer fictions, Jamesian social commentaries, and allegorical flights of fancy.