"When Virginia Woolf invited TS Eliot
down for a country weekend in 1920 she concluded with 'Please bring no
clothes'. ... Eliot
was famously wedded to his three-piece suit to the point where, Woolf
joked, he would have worn a four-piece one if such a thing existed. What
she meant by 'bring no clothes' was that at Monk’s House
they did not dress for dinner, change for church (there was no church),
or worry about getting their best clothes grubby in the garden. This
was Bloomsbury, albeit a rural version, and the clothing conventions to
which the rest of upper-middle-class society had returned after the
first world war had no place there. ..."
Charlie Porter’s New Book ‘Bring No Clothes’ Is A Radical Account Of The Bloomsbury Group
Virginia Woolf with fellow Bloomsbury Group member Lytton Strachey, in a photograph by Lady Ottoline Morrell.
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