Exploring how the Bloomsbury Group’s cutting-edge thinkers—Virginia Woolf, Sigmund Freud, and E. M. Forster—understood the intimacy of friends, lovers, spouses, and families as historically unfolding phenomena, this book offers a compelling account of modernism’s legacies in contemporary fiction and demonstrates the myriad ways in which intimacy was a guiding and persistent idea explored by writers across the 20th-century and up to the present day.

Often modernists have been celebrated for their insights into social and civilizational sickness but this book unearths a strain of modernist thought that is more complex and inspiring than this. It discusses how Bloomsbury’s thinkers wrestled with the question “Does intimate life improve?” as sexual egalitarianism expands, as taboos against same-sex love, interracial love, and singlehood wane, and as parents and children relate less formally and often more warmly toward one another. And it discusses how many of today’s major novelists, such as Salman Rushdie, Zadie Smith, Ian McEwan and Rachel Cusk, look to Bloomsbury’s thematic and formal examples when they reformulate this question for our time.