Introduction to Carolyn Heilbrun’s ‘The Bloomsbury Group’, 1968

Brenda Silver, a noted scholar of modernism, cultural studies, and of Virginia Woolf in particular, was a friend and colleague of Carolyn Heilbrun. In this essay, Silver describes the importance of Heilbrun’s work in general and the significance of her 1968 essay, ‘The Bloomsbury Group’, a courageous and ground-breaking consideration of the role of sexuality in the work and reception of the group. For several decades, until the 1991 publication of Christopher Reed’s ‘Bloomsbury Bashing’, critical work on Bloomsbury largely ignored (at best) or deprecated Bloomsbury’s queer sensibility. Silver explains that Heilbrun’s essay was an important contribution to later scholars’ understanding of Bloomsbury because it validates sexual dissidence as an important source of Bloomsbury’s creative and intellectual energy and ethos.