Fascinating, I learnt a lot.

Thanks so much to Netgalley and the publishers for letting me read an advance copy of this book in exchange for my honest review.

Source of book: NetGalley (thank you)
Relevant disclaimers: none
Please note: This review may not be reproduced or quoted, in whole or in part, without explicit consent from the author.

Unfortunately, this book turned out to a bit of a chore for me. I started it in the middle of the heatwave, which probably didn’t help, as intra-Bloomsbury relationships are dodecahedral at the best of times. There’s about six pages worth of dramatis personae at the front but it just didn’t help. Unlike a lot of books about the Bloomsbury set, this particular book takes the bright young things—the next generation of Bloomsbury lovers, admirers and hangers-on—as its focus but, err, given the way the roaring twenties went they’re all androgynously beautiful twenty-somethings who went to Oxford and potentially had mental health issues. By about the 70% mark I’m not sure I could have told you the difference between Stephen Tennant, Frances Marshall, and Stephen Tomlin. Frankly, the only reason can independently identify Roger Senhouse is because he apparently enacted a sexy crucifixion scene with Lytton Strachey.

Like, tell me more?

The central core of this book is the relationship between the two Bloomsbury generations: the way the elders created a space for acceptance, self-expression, and queerness that allowed the young generation to flourish, and in turn, the younger generation provided novelty and creativity and, y’know, their nubile twenty-something bodies for bonking. In all seriousness, the environment cultivated by the elder Bloomsburys does seem to have been genuinely beneficial—radical, too, in its gender equality (class less so, however, something this book gently elides) and sexual openness, especially in contrast to the repression of the times.
And the book itself does its best to honour the queerness of its subjects: there’s frank discussion of polyamory and pansexuality, as well as expressions of gender nonconformity that we might today recognise as reflections of trans or nonbinary identity.

Where it falls down for me is … there’s simultaneously a lot here and not a lot here? It’s a whirlpool of connections that ends up feeling like a string of rather superficial potted biographies. Virginia Woolf’s affection-shady letters provide the spine of the narrative but its heart—the polyamorous relationship between Lytton, Carrington, and Ralph Patridge—is almost entirely neglected in the second half. After a fairly engaging start, the book starts to feel like a bit like you’re stuck at a party where everyone else already knows each other and think they’re way too cool for you anyway. Which is … basically what the Bloomsbury set was. Is? Remains, even in biography.

I think I’m also a fairly shallow audience when it comes to biography: like Virginia Woolf I’m all about gossip, love affairs, and intimate emotional portraits. And I realise that’s complex because we’re talking about real people who lived real lives and it’s not really my business what they liked to do in bed. Even putting my sordid tastes, though, there’s just so much … vividity to the lives of these people, like when Clive Duncan gets so pissed off at Lytton Strachey he decides to “fire” him as a friend and writes a long letter that he doesn’t, in the end send:

“You walk in an alley sheltered and comely … your hedges are grown so tall that you know nothing of the sun, save that he falls sometimes perpendicular on your vanity and warms your self-complacency at noon.”

A subtweet just doesn’t have the same grandeur, you know?

In any case, Young Bloomsbury is a well-meaning but ultimately—for me—fairly surface-level romp through the younger Bloomsbury generation that, through what feels like a misplaced desire to be comprehensive, ends up whisking the reader past nearly everything that makes this particular group of people fascinating even a century later.

Absolutely fascinating!
I've always had an interest in the Bloomsbury Group - (doing an english degree at Birkbeck rather helped with that, as having lessons in the very rooms that the Bloomsbury group once lived in, added an extra link to them), and as a Strachey, author Nino Strachey has a very specific link to the Bloomsbury group herself.
'Young Bloomsbury', as the title may suggest, focuses on a younger generation of the Bloomsbury group, with characters like novelist Julia Strachey, the rather gothic Edward Sackville-West, and the sculptor Stephen Tomlin.
Carrying on the escapades of their previous Bloomsbury Group predecessors, these people continue the themes that had been begun before them - art, love, and open sexuality. Ahead of their time - and beautifully brought to life by the talented Nino Strachey - this introduced me to new members of the Bloomsbury Group who I'd love to know more about

Young Bloomsbury explores the transgressive lives of the second generation of the Bloomsbury Group looks at the impact new ideals and ways of being had on original members of the group. It's written by Nino Strachey who is interestingly one of the original members' descendants.

I really enjoy reading about people who have led unconventional lives so I was excited to check this out. Young Bloomsbury is clearly well researched and well written, it covers a myriad of interesting characters and it contains an impressive amount of information about the lives people involved with Bloomsbury.

As someone fairly new to the Bloomsbury Group topic, this was a really interesting read for me as I didn’t know much about the original members of the group and knew virtually nothing about the second wave of members in the 1920's. I found the sort of contents page that introduced the significant players a useful tool to refer back to as it was occasionally hard to keep track of who was who. I'd definitely recommend it to readers looking for an introduction to all things Bloomsbury.

My favourite passage was probably this: 'A family of choice, they created ties of love that lasted a lifetime, embracing queerness, acknowledging difference, defying traditional moral codes.'

Thank you to Netgalley and John Murray Press for the e-ARC in exchange for an honest review.

I found it enjoyable and learned something new. Bloomsbury set always fascinated me and I read quite a number of books by those authors.
This was an entertaining and compelling way to learn about the generation.
If you want a high brow, very serious book that's not for you as I found it quite enjoyable.
Recommended.
Many thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for this ARC, all opinions are mine

A thoroughly enjoyable romp through the unconventional lives and lives of the next generation, where Bloomsbury met the Bright Young Things. This book pushes into territory previously unexplored by tracing the connections of key players beyond the traditional narrative, introducing new names from the 1920s and tracing the development and decline of the decade’s mood. Relationships and identities receive a fresh and necessary reassessment in line with improving awareness of non-binary and LGBT issues. With the focus on key Strachey members, a new cast lounge in the sun, struggle with their passions and strive to produce art.

Having read this, I feel it will be of more interest to those who haven’t, perhaps, read as many books about the Bloomsbury group as I have. Of course, author Nino Strachey is a relative of Lytton Strachey, one of the ‘Old Bloomsbury’ set and so I had hoped for some real insights and unseen material. The idea behind this title being that the emphasis will not be on Virginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant, etc. but on the ‘Young Bloomsbury’ set that followed them and were inspired by their flouting of conventions and open conversation. Seen by many at the time as smug and self-absorbed, they were followed by the ‘Bright Young Things’ of the Twenties, who were impressed and encouraged to be open about their sexuality by the generation of writers and artists who preceded them.

Strachey begins though with a rather uninspiring, potted history of the Bloomsbury group, before moving on to the next generation – Stephen Tennant, Eddy Sackville-West, Julia Strachey, Frances Marshall and others. The problem that the younger Bloomsbury set faced was that, as the Thirties approached, and politics and global depression appeared, then personal choice and freedom of self-expression again began to look self-absorbed. The problem with this book is that Strachey rarely delves deeply into events and tends to highlight those who, presumably, she has, or found, more information on. As such, I ended the book feeling as though I had eaten an insubstantial meal and was left, casting around, feeling rather unsatisfied. A good introduction, but it could have offered more. I received a copy of this book from the publisher, via NetGalley, for review.

If you've read about the Bloomsberries before then this book over-promises and doesn't wholly deliver on its premise. The hook is that this is not supposed to be about the core Bloomsburyites but about the next generation of youthful free thinkers who looked to their elders while forging their own spaces. In reality, though, this book spends far longer with the well-known and less with the new names. There's an enticing introduction but then we flip backwards. I also thought this was quite uneven in its attention with more time spent on Julia Strachey and Stephen Tennant.

For a book which is tracing a sort of counterculture, it feels remarkably staid where I wanted flamboyance and something a bit more exciting. I'd say that if you're new to reading about the Bloomsbury Group, this will be a good, if not innovative, introduction.

It’s questionable whether the world needs yet another book about the Bloomsbury Group but Nino Strachey’s contribution approaches the topic from an unusual angle. Her focus isn’t on the Bloomsbury Group itself, instead she turns her gaze on the younger generations who became its avid fans and followers. These were a mix of socialites, artists, students and writers, from Stephen Tennant and Julia Strachey to Frances Partridge, attracted to its possibilities for a newly-scripted, post-WW1 English society. Young men and women fascinated by the promise of freedom of expression and, above all, a space in which they could explore and celebrate queer identities. They came together through different routes: wild parties, exclusive dining clubs, some flocked to Lytton Strachey’s home at Ham Spray others to literary salons in Bloomsbury itself. Strachey’s is a relatively fresh perspective and I was particularly fascinated by her survey of queer cultures of the 1920s. She also does a decent job of highlighting the difficult negotiations between sexual exploration and life in a wider, hostile environment in which any overt signs of queer expression were often rigidly policed and punished. But for readers, like me, who’ve already devoured a number of Bloomsbury Group studies and biographies there isn’t a lot that’s particularly revelatory here. It’s a fairly descriptive piece, well-researched but sometimes a little plodding and fragmentary, with some sections that veer towards the potted biography. It’s also quite unbalanced at times, so there’s a wealth of material relating to author Julia Strachey and Stephen Tennant but not so much on lesser-known Bloomsbury acolytes. But for anyone interested in the background to books like Orlando who hasn’t read much, if anything, about Bloomsbury then this is a reasonable, undemanding introduction to its key players and their interactions with their surroundings.