Bloomsbury Group down to London. In 1905 Vanessa began the "Friday Club" and Thoby ran "Thursday Evenings", which became the basis for the Bloomsbury Group, which to some was really "Cambridge in London". Thoby's premature death in 1906 brought them more firmly together and they became what is now known as the "Old Bloomsbury" group who met in earnest beginning in 1912. In the 1920s and 1930s the group shifted when the original members died and the next generation had reached adulthood. The Bloomsbury Group, mostly from upper middle-class professional families, formed part of "an intellectual aristocracy which could trace itself back
Virginia Woolf criticism. Virginia Woolf was born into an agnostic family, and in a letter to Ethel Smyth, Woolf gives a scathing denunciation of Christianity, seeing it as self-righteous "egotism" and stating "my Jew has more religion in one toenail—more human love, in one hair." Woolf stated in her private letters that she thought of herself as an atheist. Hermione Lee cites a number of extracts from Woolf's writings that many, including herself, would consider offensive, and these criticisms can be traced back as far as those of Wyndham Lewis and Q.D. Leavis in the 1920s and 1930s. Other authors provide more