Publisher's Synopsis
To understand the Bloomsbury Set one must understand the French expression panier de crabes, a basket of crabs, crawling over and through each other, copulating, yes, but also biting, their claws fully deployed. It was a sect where the sexes intersected, said a member, promiscuous to a degree unknown to even the Renaissance Borgias. Vanessa Bell begged the immensely handsome artist Duncan Grant to provide the seed to produce a child, which he did while also sleeping with Vanessa's husband Clive, as well as writer David Garnett who, looking down at Duncan's baby in her crib, vowed he would marry her, thusly prolonging his nearness to her father Duncan, a vow he kept [she would later have other lovers who were also sleeping with her at the same time they were with her father Duncan and with her husband Garnett]. The members of the Bloomsbury Set were writers and poets, artists and philosophers, basically atheists and pacifists utterly convinced they were the intellectual center of the world. The intersection of their sexes went far beyond playing musical beds. Their love and devotion was so deep that women married the men who were sleeping with the men they really loved, in order, like Garnett with Duncan's child, to be in proximity to the men too homosexual to sleep with them. The women were also known to commit suicide when the man they loved died, as did Dora Carrington who shot herself following the death of Lytton Strachey, and even Virginia Woolf loaded a coat with stones and walked into a river [a suicide based on multiple causes]. The history of the Bloomsbury Set is concomitantly the history of the Cambridge Apostles, also fully detailed within.The reader will not find a more complete book on the Bloomsbury Set than this, and because I wish to prove the point to the largest number of readers possible, I've priced the paper edition at the lowest cost permitted by the editors.
