London Literary Tours

How society sees women and women see themselves colours everything Woolf wrote, from essays like 'A Room of One’s Own' to experimental novels like Mrs Dalloway and Orlando, which blossomed from her affair with Vita Sackville-West. Part of the 'Bloomsbury Group' of artists and intellectuals, throughout her life, Woolf and her husband Leonard lived and worked in the squares of Bloomsbury, running the Hogarth Press publishing house from the basement of their homes. 

A poet and playwright, Eliot came to London from the US in 1914 and never left. As an avant-garde poet and as a director at the publisher Faber & Faber, he was at the heart of the Bloomsbury literary scene for decades.  His 1922 long poem 'The Waste Land' is widely regarded as the most influential poem of the 20th century.  

Edward Morgan Forster was best known for his novels A Room with a View, Howards End , and A Passage to India. He also wrote short stories, essays and biographies.
As a student at Cambridge, he became a member of the exclusive Apostles debating society, along with Lytton Strachey, Leonard Woolf and Maynard Keynes – the seedbed for the Bloomsbury Group.

From a working-class background, Lawrence is known primarily for novels like Women in Love, The Rainbow and Lady Chatterley's Lover, which was banned, as Lawrence wrote it, for decades after it was written because of its explicit depictions of sex across the boundary of class, and for its language.  Lawrence was also a playwright, an essayist, and a very fine and influential poet. 

The Irish poet and playwright W B Yeats lived in Bloomsbury for over two decades. Hosting salons at his home, and giving readings and lectures in the area, Yeats was wired into Bloomsbury's buzzing literary whirl, and was a huge influence and support to younger writers. While here in London, he continued his passionate support for Irish independence.  

The Bengali polymath Tagore wrote plays, poetry and prose works -- and he was also an artist and composer. He argued for Indian independence, social reforms and protection of the natural world. He spent significant periods in Bloomsbury, first as a student and later as an established writer. Tagore was the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913. 

Too often overlooked in literary history, Dorothy Richardson was a pioneer in the use of what we now call 'stream of consciousness', influencing Virginia Woolf. Her epic 13-volume semi-autobiographical novel Pilgrimage charts social change and London life between 1915 and 1967.  A long-term Bloomsbury resident, Richardson was for a while a neighbour of Yeats.  

Published under the name H.D., Doolittle was in the forefront of the new 'Imagist' poetry before World War 1. An American, Doolittle travelled to London soon after her friend Ezra Pound. She was married to English poet Richard Aldington and lived with him in Bloomsbury, later forming a lifelong relationship with novelist Bryher (the pen name of Annie Winifred Ellerman). Beside her poetry, Doolittle went on to write, among other things, the autobiographical novel Bid Me to Live and the memoir Tribute to Freud which documents her experience of psychoanalysis in Vienna.  

Mew was seen as the leading female poet of her generation, and Virginia Woolf remarked that she was "quite unlike anyone else". She lived in Bloomsbury practically all her life, and it was a life scarred by tragedy and loss.  In her poetry she would often write through a male narrator, and she added a moral ambivalence to the dramatic monologue.  Mew's first collection The Farmer's Bride was published by the Poetry Bookshop run by Harold Monro and Alida Klementaski near Queen Square.

It's hard to imagine literary modernism without Ezra Pound's dynamism and ideas.  He called for artists to "Make it new!" and he led the charge with Imagism and Vorticism while working as W B Yeats's secretary. Beside writing his own poetry, including his epic work The Cantos, he did much to garner support for writers he admired, including H.D., Eliot and James Joyce, editing their work and enabling them to get published. Later he became a fervent supporter of Mussolini's brand of fascism, and after World War 2 he was imprisoned by the US for treason. 

A dynamic painter and writer, Lewis was at the forefront of the avant-garde before World War 1, setting up the Rebel Arts Centre and producing Blast, a magazine promoting art and poetry of Vorticism, a movement influenced strongly by Futurism. His novels, including Tarr and The Apes of God, debate the role of the artist in society, the latter satirising the London literary scene and its key figures including Virginia Woolf and Edith Sitwell.

An 'unsung hero' of  Bloomsbury and the wider literary world. His Poetry Bookshop, which he ran with Alida Klementaski, was a locus for anyone who was anyone in the world of poetry, publishing books and periodicals and hosting public recitals. Monro was himself a poet of note.