The Bloomsbury Group Memoir Club

As memoirs become increasingly popular, it is somewhat surprising that so little attention has been given to one of the most notable manifestations of memoirs in modern time: the Bloomsbury Group's 'Memoir Club'. Leading Bloomsbury scholar S.P. Rosenbaum collected most of the surviving memoirs by the group, including those by first members Virginia and Leonard Woolf, Roger Fry, J.M. Keynes, Lytton Strachey, E. M. Forster, Vanessa and Clive Bell, Molly and Desmond MacCarthy and Duncan Grant.

Using this original archival research, Rosenbaum had written a large part of a history of the Memoir Club before his death in May 2012. Edited by distinguished Woolf scholar James M. Haule, who provides an introduction, an afterword, and an annotated list of memoirs, The Bloomsbury Group Memoir Club offers a perceptive chronicle of the Memoir Club's origins and first years, an important addition to our understanding not just of the work of the Club's participants, but also of twentieth-century autobiography and the history of Bloomsbury more generally.

S. P. Rosenbaum was Professor Emeritus of English Literature at the University of Toronto, Canada until his death in 2012. He was a leading scholar of Woolf and the literary history of the Bloomsbury Group, and his many publications include three volumes tracing the literary history of Old Bloomsbury from the 1880s to 1914: Victorian Bloomsbury (1987), Edwardian Bloomsbury (1995) and Georgian Bloomsbury (2003). He also collected Woolf's published and unpublished memoirs in The Platform of Time: Memoirs of Family and Friends (2008)

James M. Haule is Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Texas Pan American, USA. He is a distinguished scholar and author and was a member of the Editorial Committee of the Shakespeare Head Press Edition of Virginia Woolf and edited its edition of The Waves. Previous publications also include Editing Virginia Woolf: Interpreting the Modernist Text (with J. H. Stape, 2002).

Introduction; James M. Haule
1. Outlines
2. Ancestral Voices, Cambridge Conversations
3. Beginnings
4. Private and Public Affairs: 1921-1922
5. Hiatus: 1922-1928
6. Old Bloomsbury
Afterword; James M. Haule
Appendix i. Virginia Woolf Among the Apostles
Appendix ii. A List of Memoir Club Papers; S.P. Rosenbaum and James M. Haule