Many photographs of queer members of the Bloomsbury group.

Through a series of case studies from the mid-eighteenth century to the start of the twenty-first, this collection of essays considers the historical insights that ethno/auto/biographical investigations into the lives of individuals, groups and interiors can offer design and architectural historians. Established scholars and emerging researchers shed light on the methodological issues that arise from the use of these sources to explore the history of the interior as a site in which everyday life is experienced and performed, and the ways in which contemporary architects and interior designers draw on personal and collective histories in their practice. Historians and theorists working within a range of disciplinary contexts and historiographical traditions are turning to biography as means of exploring and accounting for social, cultural and material change - and this volume reflects that turn, representing the fields of architectural and design history, social history, literary history, creative writing and design practice. Topics include masters and servants in eighteenth-century English kitchens; the lost interiors of Oscar Wilde's 'House Beautiful'; Elsa Schiaparelli's Surrealist spaces; Jean Genet, outlaws, and the interiors of marginality; and architect Lina Bo Bardi's 'Glass House', S?Paulo, Brazil.

Lady Ottoline Morrell was the foremost host of the Bloomsbury set, offering sustenance and friendship to Virginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell, TS Eliot, DH Lawrence, Duncan Grant and her lover Bertrand Russell, to name but a few. This book is a revised and updated edition of the author's original biography of Ottoline first published in 1975 worldwide. It has been updated, with vignettes about her sources, including lunch at ?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags" / Charleston with Duncan Grant, and a ship's tumbler of sherry with David Garnett as a prelude to discussing "skeletons in Ottoline's cupboard"). Her sources in Texas where she read more than 8,000 letters to Ottoline including 2,500 letters from Bertrand Russell, can now be located in new footnotes. Darroch remains as impressed as ever by Ottoline's courage and determination to forgo the comfortable life of an aristocrat to mix with – and champion – some of the 20th century's leading artists and writers. The definitive biography.

Katie Roiphe’s stimulating work has made her one of the most talked about cultural critics of her generation. Now this bracing young writer delves deeply into one of the most layered of subjects: marriage. Drawn in part from the private memoirs, personal correspondence, and long-forgotten journals of the British literary community from 1910 to the Second World War, here are seven “marriages à la mode”—each rising to the challenge of intimate relations in more or less creative ways. Jane Wells, the wife of H.G., remained his rock, despite his decade-long relationship with Rebecca West (among others). Katherine Mansfield had an irresponsible, childlike romance with her husband, John Middleton Murry, that collapsed under the strain of real-life problems. Vera Brittain and George Gordon Catlin spent years in a “semidetached” marriage (he in America, she in England). Vanessa Bell maintained a complicated harmony with the painter Duncan Grant, whom she loved, and her husband, Clive. And her sister Virginia Woolf, herself no stranger to marital particularities, sustained a brilliant running commentary on the most intimate details of those around her. Every chapter revolves around a crisis that occurred in each of these marriages—as serious as life-threatening illness or as seemingly innocuous as a slightly tipsy dinner table conversation—and how it was resolved…or not resolved. In these portraits, Roiphe brilliantly evokes what are, as she says, “the fluctuations and shifts in attraction, the mysteries of lasting affection, the endurance and changes in love, and the role of friendship in marriage.” The deeper mysteries at stake in all relationships.

"Bloomsbury on the Mediterranean," is how Vanessa Bell described France in a letter to her sister, Virginia Woolf. Remarking on the vivifying effect of Cassis, Woolf herself said, "I will take my mind out of its iron cage and let it swim.... Complete heaven, I think it." Yet until now there has never been a book that focused on the profound influence of France on the Bloomsbury group. In Bloomsbury and France: Art and Friends, Mary Ann Caws and Sarah Bird Wright reveal the crucial importance of the Bloomsbury group's frequent sojourns to France, the artists and writers they met there, and the liberating effect of the country itself. Drawing upon many previously unpublished letters, memoirs, and photographs, the book illuminates the artistic development of Virginia and Leonard Woolf, Clive Bell, David Garnett, E. M. Forster, Lytton Strachey, Dora Carrington, and others. The authors cover all aspects of the Bloomsbury experience in France, from the specific influence of French painting on the work of Roger Fry, Duncan Grant, and Vanessa Bell, to the heady atmosphere of the medieval Cistercian Abbaye de Pontigny, the celebrated meeting place of French intellectuals where Lytton Strachey, Julian Bell, and Charles Mauron mingled with writers and critics, to the relationships between the Bloomsbury group and Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Gertrude Stein, Andre Gide, Jean Marchand, and many others. Caws and Wright argue that Bloomsbury would have been very different without France, that France was their anti-England, a culture in which their eccentricities and aesthetic experiments could flower. This remarkable study offers a rich new perspective on perhaps the most creative group of artists and friends in the 20th century.

Photographs, some barely known, on the domestic lives of Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) and Vanessa Bell (1879-1961) and the historical, cultural and artistic milieux of their circle in Bloomsbury, including Vivienne Eliot, Vita Sackville-West, Lady Ottoline Morrell and Dora Carrington.

A Russian Jew of Bloomsbury looks at the remarkable influence that an outsider had on the tightly knit circle of Britain's cultural elite. Among Koteliansky's friends were Katherine Mansfield, Leonard and Virginia Woolf, Mark Gertler, Lady Ottoline Morrell, H.G. Wells, and Dilys Powell. But it was his close and turbulent friendship with D.H. Lawrence that proved to be Koteliansky's lasting legacy. In a lively and vibrant narrative, Galya Diment shows how, despite Kot's determination, he could never escape the dark aspects of his past or overcome the streak of anti-Semitism that ran through British society, including the hearts and minds of many of his famous literary friends.