intertext

The Bloomsbury group may have had some ideas and unexamined class attitudes that today we find repugnant or disturbing, but they were the antithesis of fascists: a) artists of any kind do not make good members of an authoritarian society (even the ones like Wyndham Lewis who are all 'isn't Mussolini great? whoa, macho manly man', or DH Lawrence and his creepy blood stuff) and b) can you imagine trying to regiment any of them? they were too busy bickering and having internal feuds. They believed passionately in the individual and relationships: Forster was peripheral to the core group but that thing about betraying friend or country would, I think, have been the sort of notion that they would have signed up to. Woolf's 3 Guineas was written under the threat of fascism and impending war and forms part of a theme in 30s women's writing written in these circumstances.