This first of a three-volume study of the early literary history of the Bloomsbury Group describes the intellectual, family and Cambridge backgrounds of Bloomsbury as they are reflected in the Group's early or autobiographical works, covering not only Virginia Woolf, E.M. Forster and Lytton Strachey, but also Leonard Woolf, John Maynard Keynes, Roger Fry, Clive Bell, Desmond MacCarthy and others. The book is a comprehensive study of the literary history of their interrelated achievements. It is also an account of the ideas and people who were the early influences on the Bloomsbury Group. It sees the modern period, not as the age of "great men", but in a new light, where original ideas about art, women and society, as they affected and continue to affect - writing, painting, thought, politics, had their beginning. S.P. Rosenbaum is the editor of "A Bloomsbury Group Reader", "Virginia Woolf's Women & Fiction: The Manuscript Versions of 'A Room of One's Own'" and "The Bloomsbury Group: A Collection of Memoirs, Commentary and Criticism".