The Bloomsbury Group Memoir Club (PDF)

S. P. Rosenbaum was Professor Emeritus of English Literature at the University of Toronto, Canada, until his death in 2012. He was a leading scholar of Woolf and the literary history of the Bloomsbury Group, and his many publications include three volumes tracing the literary history of Old Bloomsbury from the 1880s to 1914: Victorian Bloomsbury (1987), Edwardian Bloomsbury (1995) and Georgian Bloomsbury (2003). He also collected Woolf's published and unpublished memoirs in The Platform of Time: Memoirs of Family and Friends (2008)


James M. Haule is Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Texas Pan American, USA. He is a distinguished scholar and author and was a member of the Editorial Committee of the Shakespeare Head Press Edition of Virginia Woolf and edited its edition of The Waves. Previous publications also include Editing Virginia Woolf: Interpreting the Modernist Text (with J. H. Stape, 2002).

'The number of people now preoccupied with life-writing and memoirs is extraordinarily large; when we are talking about the figures in the Memoir Club, the interest expands incredibly exponentially. It would be difficult to exaggerate the importance of understanding the work of the Memoir Club in regard to the history of twentieth-century British culture. And no one would be more qualified than the late S.P. Rosenbaum to write the history of a club that included, basically, the 'membership' of the Bloomsbury Group.' - Morris Beja, Emeritus Professor of English, Ohio State University, USA

'Rosenbaum's project, left unfinished at his death in 2012, was to reconstruct as far as possible the club's history and to republish the existing papers in a single accompanying volume his notes make a convincing case for reconsidering the memoirs in context, as a group of essays with internal connections' - London Review of Books

'Rosenbaum's study is a valuable addition to the library of any reader interested by the life and writings of the Bloomsbury Group' - Times Literary Supplement

'S P Rosenbaum sadly died before he could complete this book about an aspect of Bloomsbury that is often forgotten the group's love of autobiography It is nevertheless a fascinating account and of a group who were famously intertwined.' - Lesley McDowell, The Independent

'Rosenbaum, who died shortly before finishing this fine book, makes a terrific case for the way that reaching into their personal and collective pasts pushed club members to take their work to new that is, old places.' - Kathryn Hughes, The Guardian