The Bloomsbury Group was comprised of Artists, Writers, Economists, Art Critics. A group of English intellectuals active from the early 1900's until the 1930's, who met for discussion in the Bloomsbury area of London in the early 20th century.
The romantic record of the group's members is noteworthy, because they demonstrated a sexual freedom that was ahead of their time. Beginning in 1925, Virginia Woolf had a passionate affair with Vita Sackville-West. In the first flush of romance, Woolf wrote what has become a classic of gay fiction, the experimental fantasy Orlando (1927), which argued that love and passion ignore gender.
Others in the Bloomsbury group exhibited similar bisexual tendencies. Although Vanessa Stephen married Clive Bell, the great love of her life was Duncan Grant, who was primarily gay and had been sexually involved with her brother Adrian. During World War I, they lived together at a country estate with David "Bunny" Garnett, who was a lover of both.
Triangular relationships with a gay twist were common within the Bloomsbury circle. Strachey was gay, but in the early days of Bloomsbury, he proposed marriage to Virginia Stephen (Woolf). In the 1920s, he lived in platonic bliss with surrealist painter Dora Carrington. When they both fell in love with the same man, Carrington married the object of their mutual desire, and the three set up housekeeping together. The cross-dressing Carrington had affairs with women, confiding to a friend that she had "more ecstasy" with female lovers than with men - "and no shame."
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