Virginia Woolf was a founding member of the Bloomsbury Group, and her work was strongly influenced by this context. The Bloomsbury Group, also known as the Bloomsbury Set, was a group of English writers, intellectuals, and artists who worked in the first half of the 20th century. They formed a loose collective of relatives and friends who shared a common philosophy and met to discuss their ideas and work. Many of them studied at the University of Cambridge and Kings College, London. They were socially as well as artistically experimental, espousing feminism, pacifism, and freer sexuality. A famous description of them, often attributed to the American writer Dorothy Parker, quips that “they lived in squares, painted in circles and loved in triangles.”

They did not have a single artistic or intellectual agenda but shared a sensibility or philosophy that celebrated the importance of the arts. Their works were influential across many fields including literature, criticism, economics, and aesthetics. They also helped to shape attitudes to pacificism, feminism, gender, and sexuality.

Though there were different members of the Bloomsbury Group at different times, the 10 core members included: art critic Clive Bell; painter Vanessa Bell (also sister of Virginia Woolf); fiction writer E.