Bloomsbury and Nature

This chapter explores the ways in which the Bloomsbury group’s ideas about art and literature were forged in response to changing conceptions of nature. Beginning with an overview that locates the Bloomsbury group’s interest in nature within the scientific, philosophical and political contexts of the early twentieth century, the chapter moves onto examine how the Post-Impressionist art theory of Roger Fry and Clive Bell looked to rearticulate the relationship between aesthetics and nature. Following this, the chapter turns to the ways in which Virginia Woolf’s fiction was not only informed by this Post-Impressionist understanding of nature, but offered a feminist response to implicit ideas of gender and sex within it. Bringing Woolf’s writing into comparison with the pastoral poetry of Vita Sackville-West, the chapter concludes by exploring how both wrote against patriarchal or heteronormative understandings of the natural world and, in doing so, foreshadowed contemporary concerns within queer ecology.