Popular and scholarly interests in Bloomsbury have been robust in recent years, with film adaptations of Virginia Woolf's and E. M. Forster's novels, homages by Michael Cunningham and Zadie Smith, biographies of several group members, critical examinations of its literary and philosophical importance, and studies of its role in the history of liberalism, feminism, pacifism, gay liberation, and other aspects of culture and politics. This interest suggests that Bloomsbury illuminates many dimensions of modern life. The current turn in modernist studies – toward examining modernity (a social phenomenon) as the context for modernism (aesthetic responses to this phenomenon) – also suggests that Bloomsbury deserves a central role in the story of literary modernism.

The following six chapters accord Bloomsbury such a role, and explore how early-twentieth-century modernity, with its demographic and intellectual shifts, both inspired and resulted from a reinvention of intimacy that was a primary source of the group's finest work. From the increased frequency of divorce (which seemed ominous at the time, but seems more modest in retrospect), to the emergence of women in higher educational and professional institutions, to the rise of sexology, psychoanalysis, and subcultures – such as Bloomsbury – organized around loves that had dared not speak their name in the nineteenth century, the period that I examine (roughly 1900 to 1930) saw many signs that an old order was crumbling.

The challenges precipitated by these changes were multidimensional.