SOURCE: "Bloomsbury Revisited: Flipping through the Albums," in Virginia Woolf: Themes and Variations, Pace University Press, 1993, pp. 329-37.

In the following essay, Jacobsen examines Virginia Woolf's Moorean analysis in her letters and diaries of love and friendship, based on the Bloomsbury Group's understanding of Moore's Principia Etnica.

I discuss here primarily Virginia Woolf's 1918-1919 Diary, but her Letters led me to look into whether she practiced a conscious ethic of friendship growing out of the philosophy of G. E. Moore. Virginia's letters are prized for the affection and attention shown the writers and artists of Bloomsbury. Woolf wittily sustains Lytton Strachey in the bleak years of writer's block. She helps organize a fund to enable T. S. Eliot to quit work at Lloyd's Bank. She supports the value alike of the painting and nurturing motherhood of Vanessa Bell, and affirms the specialness of each nephew and niece from...