Clapham Sect

Among the Bloomsbury Group s forebears and relations were noted opponents of slavery, belonging to the Clapham Sect, lawyers and civil servants, members of the judiciary, agents of Empire, Cambridge dons, Quakers,... 

Raymond Williams, Problems in Materialism and Culture (London Verso, 1980), The Bloomsbury Faction , pp. 148-69. See especially Williams on Bloomsbury s social conscience , ibid., pp. i55ff. In connection with Williams s comparative discussion of Godwin and his Circle and of The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood , consider also The Clapham Sect , as described in note 6 above. 

Interestingly, however, Marcus s writing on Woolf has been substantially concerned precisely with the family album she reiterates, for example, that Woolf s pacifism is the legacy of her ancestors in the Clapham Sect, and of her Quaker aunt, Caroline Stephen, whose mystical writings Marcus sees as a crucial influence on Woolf, a mysticism rendered feminist in part through its transmission from aunt to niece, bypassing the father and, to some extent, the mother. 

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