Among the Bohemians: Experiments in Living 1900-1939 » (Reprint)

Virginia Nicholson was born in Newcastle-upon-Tyne. After studying at Cambridge University she lived in France and Italy and then worked as a documentary researcher for BBC television. Her first book, Charleston: A Bloomsbury House and Garden — written in collaboration with her father, Quentin Bell — was an account of the Sussex home of her grandmother, the painter Vanessa Bell — Virginia Woolf's sister. She is married, has three children and lives in Sussex, England.

They ate garlic and didn't always bathe; they listened to Wagner and worshiped Diaghilev; they sent their children to coeducational schools, explored homosexuality and free love, vegetarianism and Post-impressionism. They were often drunk and broke, sometimes hungry, but they were of a rebellious spirit. Inhabiting the same England with Philistines and Puritans, this parallel minority of moral pioneers lived in a world of faulty fireplaces, bounced checks, blocked drains, whooping cough, and incontinent cats.

They were the bohemians.

Virginia Nicholson — the granddaughter of painter Vanessa Bell and the great-niece of Virginia Woolf — explores the subversive, eccentric, and flamboyant artistic community of the early twentieth century in this "wonderfully researched and colorful composite portrait of an enigmatic world whose members, because they lived by no rules, are difficult to characterize" (San Francisco Chronicle).

The New Yorker

In a vibrant catalogue of anecdotes and tragicomic episodes, Nicholson pays homage to British writers and artists who challenged convention before the Second World War. Living for art could exact a price—Robert Graves, hoping to subsidize his writing, made a disastrous foray into shopkeeping, while a destitute Dylan Thomas used his books as furniture. For Nicholson, such recklessly hand-to-mouth living is downright heroic. Although the eccentric domestic arrangements of the Bloomsbury group are a familiar topic, she casts her net wide to include lesser-known figures like Nina Hamnett, a fixture at London’s Café Royal, and Betty May—the cocaineaddicted model of the sculptor Jacob Epstein—whose signature dish was grilled mouse on toast.