Book excerpt: Because whenever they wrote the members of Bloomsbury tried to write well, there is an abundant variety of illuminating and delightful reading to be found in the short prose works of the Group's novelists, biographers, critics, and even political economists. In " A Bloomsbury Group Reader Professor Rosenbaum offers a representative selection of such writings by Virginia Woolf, E. M. Forster, Lytton Strachey, Roger Fry, Desmond MacCarthy, Clive Bell, Leonard Woolf, John Maynard Keynes, and Vanessa Bell. His focus in this selection is not upon the lives of the Group but upon what finally must justify our interest in them: their work, in this instance, as writers.