Among the Bohemians: Experiments in Living 1900-1939 (Hardcover)

Virginia Nicholson is perhaps uniquely well placed to write about the Bohemian movement of the early 20th century, of which the Bloomsbury Group was a key part: she is the daughter of the writer and artist Quentin Bell, himself the son of Clive and Vanessa Bell. However, part of the charm of this eminently informed and readable account is that Nicholson does not seek to use her family connections to sell a rehashed litany of who-was-sleeping-with-whom Bloomsbury gossip, but has instead chosen to describe in minute domestic detail exactly what it meant to live as one of these free spirits in the middle of drab, joyless Edwardian Britain. She does not seek to explain the literary influences or grand passions that shaped the work and lives of these beautiful peacocks - Dylan Thomas, Katherine Mansfield, Ottoline Morrell, Robert Graves, Lytton Strachey, Eric Gill, Augustus John - but concentrates her attention on how they dressed their children; what underwear they wore; how they learned to cook; what it was like for a middle-class woman brought up with servants to have to empty the family's chamber pots. Beatrice Campbell's account of Katherine Mansfield's attempts to wash the dishes after cooking a leg of mutton - 'We had very little hot water and no washing powder, and the grease was in thick layers over everything.... I tried to make a joke of our predicament, but Katherine was beyond jokes; she started to weep ceaselessly and hopelessly' - says as much about the life of a woman writer of her time as any biography of Mansfield ever could. Similarly, the descriptions of the new culinary experiences of these adventurous creatures, garlic and herb-laden dishes with fresh fish and vegetables, contrast so tellingly with the boring, tasteless brown slop served in 'respectable' households that the author is able to draw a wonderful pen-picture of the excitement and interest these trail-blazers generated. Nicholson's breezy, entertaining style enhances, rather than detracts from this rigorously researched and annotated history: a thoroughly enjoyable read. (Kirkus UK)

After surveying grandmother Vanessa Bell's home in Charleston: A Bloomsbury House and Garden (not reviewed), Nicholson moves on to a broader but related subject: lifestyles of the poor and avant-garde. "I make no apology for my fascination with the laundry-list view of history," writes the author, who deems domestic arrangements and personal habits "the kind of detail I find not only revealing but indispensable to understanding." This everything-including-the-kitchen-sink approach is most effective when applied to less familiar material. Chapters on bohemian attitudes toward marriage, sex, and feminism tend to degenerate into, yes, laundry lists of famously unconventional menages (Laura Riding, Robert and Nancy Graves; Duncan Grant, Vanessa and Clive Bell, etc.) and yet another portrait of New Women scandalizing the bourgeoisie with their short hair and cigarettes. But when Nicholson delves into childrearing, clothes, food, and housework, she vividly delineates just how revolutionary Britain's early-20th-century bohemians were. (She seems unaware that an American avant-garde was pursuing a similar course.) The author's resume of the ridiculous amount of tight-fitting attire well-bred Edwardians, male and female, had to change in and out of several times a day, for example, reminds us how liberating were the loose, colorful garments painter Augustus John and others wore, romantically emulating carefree gypsies. Dirty, squalid garrets make more sense after Nicholson points out that the alternative before modern appliances was a houseful of servants, the money to pay them, and hours spent supervising them. The avant-garde prided themselves on caring about art, not appearances, and while the author doesn't ignore the contradictions involved in generally middle-class rebels living like the most disreputable poor, she respects their commitment to a freer existence. As well as the usual Bloomsbury suspects, Nicholson draws her examples from other names well known in British cultural gossip: Cyril Connolly, Nancy Cunard, Dylan and Caitlin Thomas, Ford Madox Ford, etc., etc. Entertaining social history, though the author's fondness for long quotes and many, many examples make it more fun to browse than to read cover-to-cover. (Kirkus Reviews)

Bohemia is a hard country to place, yet it was utterly familiar to the people who inhabited it from the turn of the 20th century until the outbreak of World War II, a place where to be different was to be accepted. Here they felt at home and among friends: the disparate, eccentric club of artists, some rich, some poor, talented and untalented, who believed in friendship more than family and who by their very differences proclaimed to be part of a confederacy. Among these self-styled Bohemians were Ralph Partridge, Nancy Nicholson, Arthur Ransome, Rupert Brooke, Virginia Woolfe, Duncan Grant, Katherine Mansfield, Dylan and Caitlin Thomas. These people were in the avant-garde not only for their art, but possibly even more significantly, of a new kind of social life which has become so accepted today that we barely notice how utterly we have assimilated it and made it on our own. Subversive, eccentric and flamboyant, the Bohemians embarked on a quiet revolution that refashioned the way we live our daily lives. They re-invented the home, rejecting and questioning old rules and embraced creativity in every part of their lives.