Celebrated and maligned with equal vigor, the Bloomsbury Group is the best-documented artistic coterie in twentieth-century literature. The novelists Virginia Woolf and E. M. Forster, the artists Roger Fry, Duncan Grant, and Vanessa Bell, and the economist John Maynard Keynes were among this charmed circle that emerged in London before the First World War and came to exercise a complex, lingering influence on English art and letters. Theirs was a world of great talent - even genius - sexual intrigue, and gossip; they cultivated an atmosphere in which it was possible to say anything, do anything. Their peak of influence in the 1920s was followed by forty years of sustained sidelong derogation, and occasional frontal attack, from such famously hostile critics as D. H. Lawrence and Wyndham Lewis, until, in the 1960s, the idea of Bloomsbury exploded in the public imagination, transforming the Group into an almost mass-market attraction. Not in their darkest nightmares could Bloomsbury's contemporary detractors have imagined that Charleston Farmhouse, where Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant once lived and painted, would eventually attract some 15,000 visitors each year, or that a high-profile film, Carrington, would be based on Lytton Strachey's largely platonic love affair with an obscure artist on the fringes of the hallowed Group. Bloomsbury Pie examines the persistent allure of Bloomsbury - a fascination driven by nostalgia, adoration, and antipathy - and tracks the resurgence of interest in the Group, from a handful of biographies in the 1960s through the feminist discovery of Virginia Woolf in the 1970s and the enshrinement of the Bloomsberries as cultural icons in the 1980s and 1990s. Drawing on a wealth of material generated by this revival, Regina Marler chronicles the story of the Bloomsbury boom - its scholars, collectors, and fanatics - and explores the industry it has spawned among writers, publishers, and art dealers. In the process she creates an impressive social history of a tenacious and unwieldy cultural phenomenon. Not so many years ago Virginia Woolf and other members of the Bloomsbury group were barely known to the common reader. But the publication of Quentin Bell's 1972 biography of Woolf stirred a popular and academic interest in these writers that has only grown over time. From academic journals to popular biographies, from photo books to popular art films, Bloomsbury has become big business. Regina Marler treats the Bloomsbury craze with respect and a sense of humor as she charts the growth of the industry and keeps her eye on who is making the profits. Thoroughly researched, filled with great gossip, and fueled by a love of literature Bloomsbury Pie is contemporary scholarship at its best. Attracted by their pacifism, unconventional behavior, and sexual liberty, the 1960s saw a dramatic rise in interest in the Bloomsbury group, the collection of writers and artists that included Virginia Woolf, Clive Bell, Lytton Strachey, E.M. Forster, and John Maynard Keynes, among others. This popularity has only increased, becoming a mass-market phenomenon that ranges from literary biographies to art production and memorabilia collecting and even to movies such as the recent Carrington (1995). In this delightful and witty book, Marler, who edited the Selected Letters of Vanessa Bell (Pantheon, 1993) and writes and lives in San Francisco, traces the social history of this interest in Bloomsbury, considering both its enthusiasts and its detractors. The result is a work of entertaining scholarship worthy of its subjects. For public and academic libraries where Bloomsbury interest is strong.?Thomas L. Cooksey, Armstrong Atlantic State Univ., Savannah, Ga. Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc. This lively volume recounts the outpouring of masses of paper devoted to what one chronicler later described as, alternatively, ``a point of view, a period, a gang of conspirators, or an infectious disease.'' Whatever Bloomsbury was, whether Clive Bell's ``shrine of civilization'' or D.H. Lawrence's nest of ``black beetles,'' it is now an industry--literary, scholarly, artistic, and cultural. Marler, the editor of the Selected Letters of Vanessa Bell (1993), is part of this industry, but she views its history of sensational biographic revelations, disputed literary estates, and academic squabbles with equanimity and wit. Michael Holroyd's groundbreakingly frank biography of Lytton Strachey (196768) usually gets much of the credit for the Bloomsbury revival after F.R. Leavis's scorn in Scrutiny and the art world's dismissal. Marler gives an entertaining account of Holroyd's determined efforts to penetrate the circle of surviving Bloomsberries after receiving only a œ50 advance from his reluctant publisher. She also examines more deliberate strategies of keeping Bloomsbury on the cultural map. Leonard Woolf continued publishing his wife's writings after her death, always fighting to keep her work available.