Fugitive Pieces

To anyone who is interested in the ‘Bloomsbury Group’ of intellectuals and writers who coalesced around Leonard and Virginia Woolf in the first half of the 20th century, and named for the area of London where they tended to live and meet, this booklet represents a hidden gem. It contains the writing of one of the less prominent members of the group, Mary Hutchinson, who was a talented and capable writer in her own right. Her articles and short stories appeared in various journals before being published in 1927 as a collection by the Hogarth Press which was established by Leonard and Virginia Woolf in 1917.

In his introduction Gabriel Lanyi has included a diagram which is both witty and comprehensive, depicting the relationships between the various members of the group, defining them as ‘Blood,’ Marital’ and ‘Extra-Marital. Thus, about 40 individuals of varying levels of prominence are assigned places in the complex web of interconnections within the group. Quite a few of the relationships are of a homosexual nature, while others coalesce around the family ties between Virginia Woolf, her sister Vanessa Bell, and their brother Adrian Stephen (another brother, Thoby Stephen died young of typhoid fever contracted in Athens).

Mary Hutchinson was a cousin of Lytton Strachey, who was a central figure of the group, but she was also a close friend of Virginia and Vanessa and had a long-standing extra-marital affair with Vanessa’s husband, Clive Bell. In general, the members of the group tended to abandon accepted norms regarding marital fidelity, so that extra-marital affairs seem to have been regarded as more the norm than otherwise.

Mary Hutchinson’s stories and articles are presented in this booklet in the same format as they were in the original Hogarth Press volume, namely, five short stories under the heading ‘Shuttlecocks,’ thirteen articles written between 1923 and 1926 and grouped together under the heading ‘Weathercocks,’ depicting scenes from London life in a way which is both entertaining and illuminating. The last part of the booklet contains an unfinished short story about three young women which ends suddenly and mysteriously, leaving the reader curious as to how it would have continued.

Mary Hutchinson writes vividly about clothes and fashion, as well as about the London cultural scene with its performances of ballets by Diaghileff and his Ballets Russes troupe, as well as about trips to the countryside and to France. She has a keen eye and is able to depict a person, a place or a type with a few strokes of her pen. Her accounts of life in London as it is lived by those who are not short of money or time gives the reader an appetite for the good things of life in the period between the two world wars, when everything seemed to be settling comfortably into place once more, only to be disrupted by the conflagration of the Second World War, the Blitz of London, and the destruction of the secure world that that generation had come to accept as their natural way of life.