Reviews for The Bloomsbury group

The average rating for The Bloomsbury group based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2008-01-25 00:00:00 Julia Alexander Finally a definitive, accurate biography of a grand dame. Name almost any writer, poet, artist, politician, Bloomsberry, aristocrat from `1905-1938 and you will find a connection to Ottoline. Her portrait was painted by more artists, she was caricatured and pilloried in more novels by now famous writers in books that went on to become classics, her name appears in more biographies and her biography is filled with the names of people she helped before they became famous. She was one of a kind. This particular biography was made possible by the availability of the 2500 letters to her from Bertrand Russell, and all her personal papers including the letters exchanged with Lytton Strachey. The truth set against the scurrilous attacks on her by the Bloomsberries in their correspondence that was used in previous accounts of her life as fact. She deserves her place in history. Tilda Swinton played her in the 1993 movie Wittgenstein as flamboyant and colourful.

Review # 2 was written on 2009-06-09 00:00:00 Petra Hartmann Although it is out of print and not available on Kindle, I enjoyed this book hugely. It seemed to me that Miranda Seymour had solved the problem of autobiography (the structure too predictable, narrative lost in detail) by making the book a series of short stories. Ottoline's life lent itself to such a treatment because she seemed to know anybody who was anybody in the arts between 1900 and 1938, when she died. I was so sad at finishing the book that I consoled myself with a blog and with tracking down as many pictures as I could of Ottoline: