Throughout her adult life, English novelist Virginia Woolf was surrounded by a tight group of friends and relatives. Known collectively as the Bloomsbury Group, they lived near each other in townhouses in the Bloomsbury section of London and in country homes in Sussex. Because of their strong influence on British literature, art and culture, much has been written about these creative people who lived in squares and loved in triangles, particularly in their early years.

But by the 1920s, the Bloomsbury Group had come of age and were becoming more successful and well-known. Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group in the Literary 1920s looks at the personal and professional lives of Virginia and her husband, Leonard Woolf, who founded the Hogarth Press in their London home; Virginia’s sister, painter Vanessa Bell, her husband, art critic Clive Bell, and her partner in art and life, painter Duncan Grant; essayist Lytton Strachey who, after publication of his radical biography Eminent Victorians, awoke to find himself famous; art critic and founder of the Omega Workshops, Roger Fry; international economist John Maynard Keynes; E. M. Forster who published his last major novel, A Passage to India, in 1923; and American ex-patriate author of the epic 1922 poem, The Waste Land, T. S. Eliot. These characters hung out in drawing rooms, art studios and country homes, gossiping, bickering, loving and hating each other.

Come back to the fabulous decade of the 1920s and follow these writers and artists as they re-invent literature and art.

Kathleen Dixon Donnelly, Ph. D, has been involved in teaching and the creative process for over 40 years. Her dissertation for her doctorate at Dublin City University, “Such Friends,” was on early 20th-century writers’ salons, including the Bloomsbury Group. Her MBA thesis, from Duquesne University in her hometown of Pittsburgh, PA, Manager as Muse, was on Scribner’s editor Maxwell Perkins’ work with F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and Thomas Wolfe. Dr. Donnelly is the author of the paperback series, “Such Friends”: The Literary 1920s, based on the blog “Such Friends”: 100 Years Ago [www.suchfriends.wordpress.com].