Bloomsbury Group and outlook deeply influenced literature, aesthetics, criticism, and economics as well as modern attitudes towards feminism, pacifism, and sexuality. All male members of the Bloomsbury Group, except Duncan Grant, were educated at Cambridge (either at Trinity or King’s College). Most of them, except Clive Bell and the Stephen brothers, were members of "the exclusive Cambridge society, the 'Apostles'". At Trinity in 1899 Lytton Strachey, Leonard Woolf, Saxon Sydney-Turner and Clive Bell became good friends with Thoby Stephen, and it was through Thoby and Adrian Stephen's sisters Vanessa and Virginia that the men met the women of Bloomsbury when they came
Virginia Woolf weaves her in and out of the centuries, tosses her from one sex to the other, plays with her, dresses her in furs, lace and emeralds, teases her, flirts with her, drops a veil of mist around her." After their affair ended, the two women remained friends until Woolf's death in 1941. Virginia Woolf also remained close to her surviving siblings, Adrian and Vanessa; Thoby had died of typhoid fever at the age of 26. Virginia was needing a country retreat to escape to, and on 24 December 1910 Virginia found a house for rent in Firle, Sussex, near Lewes