Bloomsbury and its transformation Literature and art were very important in the early 1900s. Someone could always turn to a book or a painting to help them feel more relaxed and feel more comfortable. One of the most important groups of the early 1900s that had both literary and artistic aspects was the Bloomsbury group. This group was made up of a number of people who shared similar interests and views. One of the most important writers of the 1900s, Virginia Woolf was a member of the Bloomsberries. Many of his novels have been heavily criticized and discussed over the years. Virginia Woolf and other members of the Bloomsbury Group led very radical lives which led to radical art. The history of the Bloomsbury group, with special emphasis on its association with art and literature, has been well told (Dowling 11). “The Bloomsbury Group, an informal group of writers, artists, and critics who established themselves at the beginning of this century in the eponymous neighborhood of London, has long been in danger of suffocating under a dross pile of nostalgia” (Economist 102). They made London's Bloomsbury Square the center of activity from 1904 to the Second World War. This group included Lytton Strachey, Virginia Woolf, Leonard Woolf, E. M. Forster, V. Sackville-West, Roger Fry, Clive Bell, John Maynard Keynes and Vanessa Bell. Four of the members had gone to Cambridge in 1899 and were immediately struck by the intellectual air of the University in contrast to the sterility and boredom of the other schools they had attended. Every Bloomsbury who attended Cambridge thrived there. "Body and spirit, reason and emotion, work and play, architecture and landscape, laughter and seriousness, life and art, these couples that contrasted elsewhere were there merged into one" (http://www.feminista.com). Bloomsbury was always under fire. This is the common fate of all groups, cliques and cliques, especially if they have enough vivacity to make a new contribution to the thinking of their time. Bloomsbury has certainly not been excluded from the variations of aesthetic feeling and today its situation is similar to the Pre-Raphaelites forty years ago. “Bloomsbury however was different from the Pre-Raphaelites in that he had been criticized from a bewildering number of points of view” (Bell 10). The Bloomsbury Group has been praised as a hotbed of writing talent. The founders' main concern was to maintain that "magical quality" they had discovered at Cambridge. There was no formal membership list, leader, or set of rules to follow.