Eminent Victorians, Bloomsbury Queerness and John Maynard Keynes' The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919)

Abstract

The life and work of John Maynard Keynes should be situated in relation to his membership of the Bloomsbury Group. The members of this circle of friends experimented in their lives and works with a variety of transgressions of contemporary expectations of performances of gender and sexuality. Lytton Strachey's Eminent Victorians (1918) had a significant influence on the way in which Keynes depicted the allied leaders at the Paris Peace Conference in his book The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919). The culture of Bloomsbury queerness played a significant role in the way in which Keynes described and caricatured his political opponents. The huge popularity of Keynes' work suggests that further questions need to be asked concerning the gendered performances of allied leadership in the aftermath of World War One and the popular perceptions of those performances.