In the summer of 1916, Virginia Woolf urged her sister Venessa Bell to buy a farmhouse called "Charleston" in the Sussex Downs near Lewes. There, she, painters Duncan Grant, and Roger Fry devoted themselves to their own work and the complete redecoration of every surface of the house. "Charleston" became not only the aesthetic manifesto of the Bloomsbury Group but also the setting for the transition of their philosophy of life into physical action. All of the members of the Bloomsbury Group-including Virginia and Leonard Woolf were frequent houseguests."They really were the progressives and the embodiment of the avant-garde in early years of this century. Every time we look at them again they seem to have something for the contemporary world, whether in sexual ethics, liberation, biography, economics, feminism or painting." — Michael Holroyd, in the San Francisco Chronicle, 1995"It is a very fascinating, queer, self-absorbed, fantastic set of people. But they are very interesting..."
— Ray Costelloe, in a letter to Mary Costelloe, 1909