The group's intellectual affiliations partly stemmed from the philosopher G. E. Moore's Principia Ethica, an influential text for the youthful Strachey, Bell, Forster, and Keynes as students at Cambridge. In a passage that could have constituted Bloomsbury's credo, Moore asserted that "by far the most valuable things which we can know or imagine" are "certain states of consciousness, which may be roughly described as the pleasures of human intercourse and the enjoyment of beautiful objects."

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The Fabian thinker Beatrice Webb called Moore's book "a metaphysical justification for doing what you like and what other people disapprove of." Webb's criticism suggests the fissures between the activism of Fabian socialism and the hedonism of Bloomsbury philosophy, suggesting, too, why Bloomsbury retains the reputation of a largely apolitical Edwardian idyll.

With the exception of Virginia Woolf, Bloomsbury was more anti-Victorian than pro-modernist, its followers more the heirs to Paterian aestheticism than participants in the unfolding modernist awakening inspired by Joyce, Lawrence, Eliot, and Stein. Moreover, Bloomsbury grew to distrust any hint of sincerity or philosophical utilitarianism. "Were all truths equally good to pursue and contemplate?" asked Keynes in his recollection of Bloomsbury before the Memoir Club. "We were disposed to repudiate very strongly the idea that useful knowledge could be preferable to useless knowledge."

Enemies of Bloomsbury usually cast it as a site of homosexual self-indulgence and self-preening snobbery. The writer Wyndham Lewis called Duncan Grant "A little fairy-like individual who would have received no attention in any country except England." D. H. Lawrence, who inserted a portrait of Duncan into Lady Chatterley's Lover as a "dark-skinned taciturn Hamlet of a fellow," complained that Bloomsbury members "talk endlessly, but endlessly--and never, never a good thing said. They are cased each in a hard little shell of his own and out of this they talk words."

Taking an instant dislike to David Garnett's friend, the emphatically homosexual Francis Birrell, Lawrence wrote to Garnett, "You must leave these friends, these beetles, Birrell and Duncan Grant are done forever."

Lawrence's own insecurities as a working-class artist with homosexual inclinations, a graduate of Nottingham University and not Cambridge, undoubtedly fed his disgust. Bloomsbury paid him and other critics little mind, however. Garnett would later take Grant as a lover, and, in an astonishing development, Vanessa Bell's and Grant's out-of-wedlock child, Angelica, became at age twenty-three Garnett's wife.

Perhaps the most devastating critique of Bloomsbury came from Angelica Garnett. In 1984, she published a memoir, Deceived with Kindness: A Bloomsbury Childhood, in which she detailed her shock at discovering as an adult the identity of her real father and her realization that her husband had been her father's lover. The book's note of mournful betrayal in the face of what Garnett termed Bloomsbury's "precarious paradise" of damaging ambiguities provided a sobering coda to what had become a much-burnished myth of 46 Gordon Square.

A sun-dappled Brook Farm for bisexual transcendentalists, Bloomsbury stands as an alluring if rarefied instance in the history of personal relations.

A theory of art and an approach to living that influenced many European and American gay male and lesbian writers at the turn of the twentieth century, aestheticism stressed the independence of art from all moral and social conditions and judgments.

The Cambridge Apostles, founded in 1820 as a secret society at Cambridge University, is significant for the glbtq cultural legacy because it fostered frank discussions of homosexuality, promoted Platonic love, and helped establish Bloomsbury.

Combining elements of incongruity, theatricality, and exaggeration, camp is a form of humor that helps homosexuals cope with a hostile environment.

Homosexuality, both male and female, has a rich, divergent, and increasingly open expression in the literature of the twentieth century.

The United Kingdom has a rich and vibrant legacy of queer cultural expression despite a long history of severe legal sanctions against male-male sexual acts and other manifestations of sexual and gender deviance.

Twentieth-century efforts to reform British law and public opinions about homosexuality met with mixed results, but at the beginning of the twenty-first century the United Kingdom has emerged as a leader in recognizing the rights of its glbtq citizens.

English painter, designer, and decorative artist Dora Carrington is best known for her long relationship with gay writer Lytton Strachey, but she had affairs with both men and women, and her work has recently gained recognition.

Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson, a Cambridge classicist and friend of E. M. Forster, is significant for the glbtq legacy as the author of an immensely popular book on ancient Greece and a posthumously published, surprisingly frank autobiography.

Although Eliot tried to suppress the fact, The Waste Land is an elegy for a young Frenchman whom he met and loved in Paris and who died in the Great War in 1915.

One of the finest English novelists of the twentieth century and a tireless defender of humane values, Forster deserves a special place in the gay and lesbian literary heritage.

One of the major British artists of the twentieth century, Duncan Grant was also the sexual catalyst of the Bloomsbury Circle.

The thought of John Maynard Keynes, the most influential economist of the twentieth century, was influenced by his experience as a homosexual.

For his time, D. H. Lawrence was a maverick in his open and adventurous discussion of all sexual issues and especially homosexuality, both male and female.

Famous as the mother of modern nursing, Florence Nightingale was a tough reformer who fought for her right to a career and an individual identity in the stifling atmosphere of Victorian England.

Among Greek writers on homosexual themes, Plato is preeminent not only as a major philosopher but also as the greatest master of Greek prose.

Best known for her relationship with Virginia Woolf and for her scandalous love affairs, Vita Sackville-West was a prolific author of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction.

In addition to becoming--with Alice B. Toklas--half of an iconic lesbian couple, Gertrude Stein was an important innovator and transformer of the English language.

The English biographer and essayist Lytton Strachey spoke openly of his homosexuality to his Bloomsbury friends, but his openly gay works were published only after his death.

Oscar Wilde is important both as an accomplished writer and as a symbolic figure who exemplified a way of being homosexual at a pivotal moment in the emergence of gay consciousness.

Passionate friendships with women were essential to the life and work of novelist Virginia Woolf.