Bloomsbury : a House of Lions

Book Club Associates, London, reprint edition, 1979. Cloth, 8vo, 24 cm,. 288 pp. From the blurb - " 'In Bloomsbury' Leon Edel once told himself lightheartedly, 'there are nine characters in search of an author.’ Those nine characters are Virginia Woolf, Leonard Woolf, Lytton Strachey, Maynard Keynes, Desmond MacCarthy, Roger Fry, Clive Bell, Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant - representing among them the arts and crafts of politics, economics, fiction, biography, criticism and painting. Mr Edel sees them as, in Virginia Woolf’s words, ‘dangerous animals, rather suspicious of each other, and full of fascination and mystery*, but also as forming a group of rational and liberal individuals, characterized by intelligence and charm, an arduous work ethic and *a certain high and gentry view of civilization’. While telling their story as if it were a novel, Mr Edel is aware that a biographer may allow himself imagination of form but never imagination of fact. He has chosen an episodic form for his psychological interpretations, following his characters from childhood into middle age by relating episode to episode like the beads on a string, and a style which is elegant and vivid, lightly ironic and swift in movement. Very Good in lightly edgeworn dustwrapper.