What did the Bloomsbury Group ever do for us?

Arty snobs or creative visionaries? Monied idlers or radical Bohemians? As The Hours approaches, DJ Taylor and Suzi Feay fight over the legacy of the Woolf Pack

The case against

Nearly a century since the then Miss Virginia Stephen's first unsigned appearance in the Times Literary Supplement, the pictures have grown sepia-tinged. Sepia-tinged yet rife with glamour. Carrington (for some reason I can never visualise Carrington, only her filmic alter ego Emma Thompson in her pudding-basin haircut) romps through the Ham Spray gardens. Lady Ottoline Morrell glides serenely past the peacocks – real and human – of the Garsington lawns, while Clive Bell uncoils himself languorously from a deckchair. Meanwhile, down at the conscientious objectors' tribunal, Lytton is briskly informing the bench that if a German tried to rape his sister he would "interpose his body", and the high, curiously disconnected voices twitter on endlessly into the summer sky.

"Bloomsbury", the fragile but oddly resilient cargo of intellectuals, art theorists, novelists and wife-swappers who between them exerted such a sinewy grasp on early to mid-century English culture, represents perhaps the most desperate example yet of the reading public's tendency to admire literary people for non-literary reasons, for personality and peculiarity rather than what exists on the page.

Look at what Bloomsbury achieved, in terms of books written and ideas entertained, and with a few marked exceptions (Woolf's The Common Reader, Strachey's Queen Victoria) the trophy cabinet is conspicuously bare. Posterity – if posterity takes a view – will remember Virginia Woolf for her literary criticism rather than her stream of self-conscious fiction.

E M Forster's novels are no more than an exposure of the early 20th-century liberal sensibility that fashioned them, transfixed by their own moral inanition. Clive Bell and Roger Fry's musings on art are as dead as the passenger-pigeon, and I never yet read a page of Lytton Strachey's carbolic prose without thinking it the spiritual equivalent of someone holding their nose in case a bad smell seeps into the room.

This is an exaggeration, of course, born of too many Bloomsbury films (the latest, The Hours, opens on 14 February) and too many gossip-ridden diaries. Quite a lot of individual Bloomsbury artefacts, it scarcely needs saying, will exultantly survive – bits of Strachey, A Passage to India, even Carrington's paintings. But so, unhappily, will that fatal Bloomsbury influence, which wreaked such havoc on British intellectual life in the inter-war era and, suitably disguised and refashioned, continues to wreak it in our own.

In philosophical terms – if such garnishes are appropriate to what ultimately transformed itself into a series of style preferences – Bloomsbury offered a modern variant of that old late-Victorian liberal high-mindedness (the key text was G E Moore's Principia Ethica) based on the absolute sanctity of personal relationships. All too often, though, the personal relationships descended into a kind of high-brow fais ce que tu voudras, and all that remained was a kind of bastard liberalism founded on "taste" rather than morality, hugely elitist (people wrote about Maynard Keynes "as if he were an ordinary man", Noel Annan once complained, as if Keynes didn't eat, sleep and defecate like the rest of us) and practically incompetent.

Even such a committed anti-imperialist as George Orwell could be found muttering that an India governed on the principles advocated by Forster would have lasted approximately a week.

Like many another self-aggrandising cultural movement, Bloomsbury – exclusive, conspiratorial, jealous of its privileges – had an equally depressing effect on the writers and artists who didn't happen to be a part of it. Converted at an early stage in its posthumous development into a marketing phenomenon – this process is amusingly documented in Regina Marler's Bloomsbury Pie – fed as PhD fodder to impressionable American academics, Virginia, Lytton, Vanessa and co soon came retrospectively, and unfairly, to dominate the cultural landscapes of their time. To put it another way, Ronald Firbank and F M Mayor were better novelists than Virginia Woolf from the literary 1920s, but whichever subscriber to Charleston magazine or retracer of Virginia's last steps along the Ouse ever heard of them?

Constantly in these cultural tourneyings one looks for a point of view, an aesthetic stance even, and winds up only with a sensibility, and not a particularly pleasant sensibility at that.

Anthony Powell has a story of a Bloomsbury party some time in the late 1920s to which one guest spontaneously invited a couple of red-tunicked guardsmen picked up in the street outside. Introduced into a drawing room full of pale faces and lorgnettes, the two brawny youngsters began eagerly to avail themselves of the plates of sandwiches on offer, surrounded by a throng of party-goers chanting, like a kind of mantra, the words "How they eat!" Curiously this vignette has always seemed to summarise most of the principal objections to Bloomsbury: its detachment, snooty incomprehension of all that was not a part of it. "Only connect", eh?

Towards the end of Kingsley Amis's Lucky Jim (1954), Jim Dixon, en route to the tantalising citadels of London, amuses himself by reciting the names of the metropolitan districts to himself: "Notting Hill Gate, Pimlico, Belgrave Square, Wapping, Bloomsbury. No, not Bloomsbury," he decides. No, not Bloomsbury. Neither the peacocks shrieking on the Garsington lawns, nor the chatter rising from the Charleston deckchairs, Lytton's interposed body or a room of one's own. Anywhere but there. DJT

The case for

It can be difficult to see beyond the clichés: Lytton Strachey winding his boneless limbs round the chairs and wearing his beard like a bib; lantern-jawed Vanessa Bell daubing on the walls and doors of Charleston farmhouse and designing amateurish bookjackets for her sister; Leonard Woolf grumbling over the presses at Hogarth House while Virginia turns up her nose at servants, Jews and other writers (Tom Eliot wore green face-powder, Katherine Mansfield stank like a civet cat, etc). It's difficult to banish the aura of snobbery, elitism, selfishness, conceit and cronyism that hangs over the Bloomsbury Group. But we ought to try; for most of our criticisms reveal more about ourselves than about them.

The taunt regularly flung at the group members is that individually they weren't up to much. Though James Strachey's translation of Freud, Maynard Keynes's economic theories and Roger Fry's Post-Impressionist exhibition seem tangible enough achievements, still the carping cry goes up that Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell were indifferent painters; that Morgan Forster's novels are overrated while Lytton Strachey's biographies gather dust; that Virginia is unreadable, and Roger Fry's Omega Workshops were responsible for more ungainly screens, drab rugs and wobbly dishes than Habitat. Some of this looks like spite; much of it is simply personal taste. The more I hear critics shriek about Virginia Woolf's tedious novels, in which she dares to experiment with narrative, in which nothing happens, in which fugitive thoughts and feelings are meticulously weighed and described, the more I think yes! That's exactly why I like them!

In late 1999, the major exhibition The Art of Bloomsbury opened at the old Tate Gallery. Been there, done that, bought the catalogue – along with throngs of other enthusiasts. A sunny, unpretentious show, I thought, richly textured with its juxtaposition of furniture and crafts with painting. It was fascinating to see ideas from the French impressionists, in however naive a fashion, being brought to Sussex and Dorset; there were some real gems, and many portraits of ravishing tenderness. The homeliness of many of the items made the show extraordinarily inclusive (the way that a trip to Charleston makes you briefly think that, hmmm, maybe I could have a go at painting colourful dots and dashes over the furniture). But for the art critics, this exhibition was a dreary showcase for nonentities, a relentless parade of the second rate. The show was a popular success, and yet the critics sneered – the same critics, oddly, who accuse the Bloomsberries of snobbishness.

The greatest piece of Bloomsbury evidence, pro and con, is Virginia Woolf's diary. I think it is a masterpiece: arguably more significant even than her novels. But, shriek the detractors, what an awful woman she reveals herself to be! It's true that Woolf is not particularly concerned to cut a fine figure in its pages. She is too unsparing and honest for that. And while honesty is a provisional virtue (there's no point in confessing that you're a liar and a cheat if you have no intention of reforming), I can't help thinking it's preferable to today's politically correct hypocrisy.

The diaries give a great deal of ammunition to pelt Woolf with, not least on the Servant Question. How disgraceful that she had servants, we cry as we turn on our bountiful hot taps, as we switch on our clean, efficient central heating, as we load our washing machines. It's worth remembering that one of the tangible results of literary success for Woolf was the installation of a flush toilet to replace the earth closet at Monk's House. Yes, the heavy work of lugging coals and baking bread was left to the long-suffering Nelly Boxall – but would even the fiercest anti-Bloomsbury critic argue that the world would have been a better place if Woolf had sacked poor Nelly and worn a pinny for the whole of her married life?

Approach the novels with a whiff of condescension or arrogance and they straightaway curl up their scented petals; but Woolf's difficulty as a writer has been exaggerated. As Jeanette Winterson said in her essay on Woolf, we ought to be "tolerant of literary experiment just as we are tolerant of scientific experiment", and for much the same reasons.

As Winterson has also noted, in the case of Bloomsbury, critics tend to confuse the work and the life, misunderstanding and disparaging both. The last Bloomsbury writer alive is Frances Partridge, aged 101, whose published diaries are still appearing. Through the 1960s and '70s, Partridge found herself monitoring the rise of the Bloomsbury cult, and fighting its backlash. Her journals are a wise and warm account, above all, of friendships worked at and fought for. She also exemplifies the Bloomsbury principle of pacifism. She and her husband Ralph suffered for their beliefs during the Second World War, just as Duncan Grant, David "Bunny" Garnett and Lytton Strachey did during the First World War. We'd do well to remember their example in these bellicose times.

While the Partridge diaries do give a glimpse of what seems to most of us a strange world – one in which one never has to work or earn money other than for self-esteem – the Bloomsbury vision of life is not a despicable one. What, after all, did they live for? Colour, warmth, romping children, piles of books, sofas, intellectual debate, music, gossip, hospitality, truthfulness, disorderly gardens and sunlit rooms. So there's no need to be afraid of Woolves after all – there they are, beckoning us all inside. SF