Bloomsbury Group Virginia and Leonard Woolf from 1919. Much about Bloomsbury appears to be controversial, including its membership and name: indeed, some would maintain that "the three words 'the Bloomsbury group' have been so much used as to have become almost unusable". Close friends, brothers, sisters, and even sometimes partners of the friends were not necessarily members of Bloomsbury: Keynes’s wife Lydia Lopokova was only reluctantly accepted into the group, and there were certainly "writers who were at some time close friends of Virginia Woolf, but who were distinctly not 'Bloomsbury': T. S. Eliot, Katherine Mansfield, Hugh Walpole". Another is Vita Sackville-West,
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