ArticleOpen Access http://dx.doi.org/10.26855/jhass.2026.03.023
The Production of Space and the Construction of Community: Woolf’s Diaries and the Bloomsbury Group
Tonglu Li
School of Foreign Languages and Literature, Shandong University, Jinan 250100, Shandong, China.
*Corresponding author: Tonglu Li
Published: March 31, 2026
Abstract
This article takes the diaries of Woolf as its primary research text and, drawing on Henri Lefebvre’s theory of the “production of space,” examines the logic of community formation within the Bloomsbury Group in the urban context of London. Anchored in specific geographical coordinates, this group was continuously produced as a form of social existence through everyday practices. First, Gordon Square stabilized the neighborhood-based social network among members through dense residential clustering, thereby establishing the community’s cultural legitimacy and normative framework. Second, Tavistock Square assumed an organizational function by transforming private residences into sites of cultural production, embedding literary creation and the publishing industry deeply within the structures of everyday life. Finally, Omega Workshops and libraries demonstrate how the community entered institutional fields and reconfigured its social boundaries through negotiations of power, gender, and hierarchy. The cultural identity and stability of Bloomsbury thus emerge not only from intellectual exchange, but also from the repeated enactment of daily practices and spatial translations tied to specific addresses.
Keyword
Bloomsbury Group; Virginia Woolf; production of space; community construction
References
Bourdieu, P. (1993). The field of cultural production: Essays on art and literature. New York: Columbia University Press.
Hao, L. (2023). The Bloomsbury group. Foreign Literature, 1.
Harrison, C. (1981). English art in the modern period. London; Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Lefebvre, H. (1991). The production of space (D. Nicholson-Smith, Trans.). Oxford: Blackwell.
Massey, D. (2004). Space, place, and gender. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Qu, H. (2010). From Bloomsbury to virtual communities: The dissolution of elite power in the public sphere through networking. Chenggong (Education), 5.
Rosenbaum, S. P. (Ed.). (1995). The Bloomsbury group: A collection of memoirs and commentary. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Woolf, V. (1977). The diary of Virginia Woolf: Volume 1: 1915-1919 (A. O. Bell, Ed.; Intro. by Q. Bell). London: Har-court Brace Jovanovich.
Woolf, V. (1978). The diary of Virginia Woolf: Volume 2: 1920-1924 (A. O. Bell, Ed.; Assisted by A. McNeillie). London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
Woolf, V. (1983). The diary of Virginia Woolf: Volume 4: 1931-1935 (A. O. Bell, Ed.; Assisted by A. McNeillie). London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
Woolf, V. (2023). Thinking is my resistance (Q. Yanjing, Trans.). Singapore: Penguin Random House North Asia.
Copyright
© 2026 by the author(s).
This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) license, which permits non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited and is not modified or adapted.
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
How to cite this paper
The Production of Space and the Construction of Community: Woolf’s Diaries and the Bloomsbury Group
How to cite this paper: Tonglu Li. (2026) The Production of Space and the Construction of Community: Woolf’s Diaries and the Bloomsbury Group. Journal of Humanities, Arts and Social Science, 10(3), 376-380.
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.26855/jhass.2026.03.023