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.

This chapter analyzes Bloomsbury’s contribution to modernist visual culture through a study of one of its less central figures, Mary Hutchinson. Hutchinson’s extensive archive provides a benchmark for Bloomsbury’s incursions into modernism. Her illustrated honeymoon journal was jointly written with her husband, St. John, in May 1910, six months before the “Manet and the Post-Impressionists” exhibition outraged London’s art world. The galleries and paintings that they sought out in Paris as affluent and fashionable tourists contrast with the dealers’ showrooms and exhibitions that Roger Fry visited that autumn to select paintings for his groundbreaking exhibition. The chapter explores Mary Hutchinson’s subsequent patronage of the Omega Workshops and of Bell and Grant as decorators. She wore Omega dresses and jewelry, took her meals at an Omega dining table using Omega plates and dishes, invited the Bloomsbury artists to paint in the boathouse studio at her home in Sussex, and encouraged their radical interior and decorative designs.

This chapter explores an overlooked aspect of Bloomsbury’s contradictory relationship to embodiment, materiality, and empire: their simultaneous embrace of early twentieth-century nudity and their condemnation of undress when it is expressed by the lower classes and colonial subjects. By focusing on the Studland beach photographs archived in the Berg Collection at the New York Public Library, this chapter considers the wider cultural context regarding nude images, both in terms of historical representation and practices of nakedness asks. Ultimately, the chapter asks: how might we understand Bloomsbury’s fascination with both photography and nudity at a time when nakedness and race together influenced colonial thinking and civilizing imperatives? The chapter argues that a consideration of Bloomsbury’s relationship to nude photography cannot be severed from the history in which whiteness is the normative racial marker for early twentieth-century Britons.