Synopses & Reviews
They ate garlic and didn't always bathe; they listened to Wagner and worshiped Diaghilev; they sent their children to coeducational schools, explored homosexuality and free love, vegetarianism and Post-impressionism. They were often drunk and broke, sometimes hungry, but they were of a rebellious spirit. Inhabiting the same England with Philistines and Puritans, this parallel minority of moral pioneers lived in a world of faulty fireplaces, bounced checks, blocked drains, whooping cough, and incontinent cats.
They were the bohemians.
Virginia Nicholson -- the granddaughter of painter Vanessa Bell and the great-niece of Virginia Woolf -- explores the subversive, eccentric, and flamboyant artistic community of the early twentieth century in this wonderfully researched and colorful composite portrait of an enigmatic world whose members, because they lived by no rules, are difficult to characterize (San Francisco Chronicle).
Synopsis
Virginia Nicholson's Among the Bohemians is a portrait of England's artistic community in the first half of the twentieth century, engaged in a grand experiment.
Subversive, eccentric and flamboyant - the Bohemians ate garlic and didn't always wash; they painted and danced and didn't care what people thought. They sent their children to co-ed schools; explored homosexuality and Free Love. They were often drunk, broke and hungry but they were rebels.
In this fascinating book Virginia Nicholson examines the way the Bohemians refashioned the way we live our lives.
'Interesting, gorgeous, wonderful.... this book displays the best of bohemia itself - playful, dazzling, original' Julie Burchill, Spectator
'Racy, vivacious, warm-hearted. Offers an illuminating and well-researched portrait of life among the artists, a century ago' Miranda Seymour, TLS
Virginia Nicholson was born in Newcastle-upon-Tyne. She has worked as a documentary researcher for BBC Television and her first book, Charleston - A Bloomsbury House and Garden (written in collaboration with her father, Quentin Bell), was an account of the Sussex home of her grandmother, the painter Vanessa Bell. Her second book, Among the Bohemians: Experiments in Living 1900-1939, was published by Penguin in 2002. She lives in Sussex.