Notions of Friendship in the Bloomsbury Group: G.E. Moore, D.H. Lawrence, E.M. Forster, and Virginia Woolf

In this study I argue that G. E. Moore's philosophy of friendship developed in "Achilles or Patroclus?" and Principia Ethica, and the Great War, influenced the Bloomsbury Group's notions of friendship. I argue that these dual influences were central to Lawrence, Forster, and Woolf's representations of frustrated and melancholic friendship in their post-war novels: Women In Love, A Passage to India, and The Waves. Lawrence rejected Moore's notion of friendship suggesting that after the Great War desexualized friendship was impossible. Forster and Woolf, however, both retained some aspect of Moore's concept that friendship and the "pleasure of human intercourse" are among "the most valuable things, which we can know or imagine" (Principia Ethica 188-189). In A Passage to India and The Waves Forster and Woolf demonstrate the limitations of Moore's philosophy in a modern context, but both suggest that friendship should be cultivated despite these limitations. In this study, therefore, I refute Leonard Woolf's notion that Moore influenced the Bloomsbury Group only in its earliest stages, and I suggest that the post-war modern novel is not completely devoid of the promise of satisfactory personal relationships