They Lived in Squares, Painted in Circles, Loved in Triangles: The Bloomsbury Group, Part 2

About this course:

The title of this course, attributed to the inimitable wit and satirist Dorothy Parker (1893-1967), is a terse, spot-on description of one of the foremost literary-artistic groups/salons/gatherings in western literature and art. We address literary works by the group’s most celebrated authors—essays by Virginia Woolf; T. S. Eliot’s epoch-defining poem, “The Waste Land,” whose text Woolf hand-set for her Hogarth Press; the novel All Passion Spent by Vita Sackville-West (one of Woolf’s lovers); the wittily irreverent Lytton Stachey; the stalwartly faithful Leonard Woolf; the radical economist, John Maynard Keynes; the enthusiastic promoters of post-Impressionist art, critics Clive Bell and Desmond MacCarthy; and the ever-thoughtful E. M. Forster. We also view works of art by painters Vanessa Bell, Roger Fry, Duncan Grant, and more.