Effect of Bloomsbury group in Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse

• Paper: The Modernist literature• Presented By: Poojaba Jadeja• Roll No.: 20• Year: 2014, semester 3rd

• Submitted to: Smt. S.B. Guardy Department of English, Maharaja Krishnkumarsinhji Bhavnagar University

Effect of Bloomsbury group in Virginia Woolf’s

“To the Lighthouse”

Introduction

• The Bloomsbury Group was an influential group of associated English writers, intellectuals, philosophers and artists… This loose collective of friends and relatives lived, worked or studied together near Bloomsbury, London, during the first half of the 20th century.

Members of Bloomsbury group

• E. M. Forster, Novelist• Leonard Woolf, writer• Vanessa Bell, painter• J. M. Keynes, economist• Clive Bell, art critic• Roger Fry, modern painter, art critic• Virginia Woolf, novelist

Effect of Bloomsbury group• Experimental literature

• Intellectual language

• Narrative Technique

• Stream of consciousness

• Various themes

Sense of intellectual and aesthetic life

• Character of Mr. Ramsay as philosopher• Lily Briscoe – a painter• Augustus Carmichael, a poet• Gathering at island

Revolt against Victorianism

“We found ourselves living in the springtime of a conscious revolt against the social, political, religious, moral, intellectual and artistic institutions, beliefs and standards of our fathers and grandfathers…we were out to construct something new; we were in the van of the builders of a new society which should be free, rational, civilized, pursuing truth and beauty.”

-Leonard Woolf (“Sowing”)

Revolt against Victorianism

Mr. Ramsay•Hypothetical questions, ideas

James •Against his father

Mrs. Ramsay•Mother and hostess

Lily Briscoe & daughters•Artist, feminist

Second world war• Anti - war ideas, • Andrew’s death in To the Lighthouse

Social concern

“Central definition of the social significance of the Bloomsbury group. They were a true fraction of the existing English upper class. They were at once against its dominated ideas and values and still willingly, in all immediate ways part of it.”

-Raymond Williams (‘The Bloomsbury fraction’, problems in materialism and culture,1980)

• Characters of the novel• Mrs. Ramsay’s thinking

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