The introduction contextualises the study of Bloomsbury’s beasts in two ways. First, it reflects on strategies for close reading of literary animals and accounts for the emergence and acceleration of modernist animal studies, a subfield that explores links between modernist literature and animality of various stripes; it explains, too, how Bloomsbury can be read as part of modernism’s animal turn while adding an intensified focus on both imaginative transformations and material encounters between human and nonhuman species. Second, in order to show how questions concerning the nonhuman were embedded in the group’s conceptualisation of the human, it provides an overview of how ’beastliness’ (and related terms used in this study) enters the group’s discourse through the different conceptualisations of ‘civilisation’ articulated by its key figures.

The Coda turns to contemporary American writer Sigrid Nunez to reflect on the legacy of modernist animals – and particularly beastly Bloomsbury – for literature of the late twentieth to early twenty-first century. It shows how Nunez’s fictional biography Mitz: The Marmoset of Bloomsbury, first published in 1998 and reissued in a new edition in 2019, explores themes that are present across Bloomsbury’s own beastly writings, from affectionate companionship to the violence of colonial captivity.

This chapter considers the associations between animality and aviation in the 1930s. It begins by explaining how Garnett’s reading of the Russian entomologist Boris Uvarov was crucial to his completion of his novel The Grasshoppers Come (1931), which contains such convincing depictions of insects that Uvarov suspected Garnett had viewed them first-hand (the letters Uvarov wrote to Garnett are here reproduced for the first time). Reading this novel alongside his diary-record of learning to fly, A Rabbit in the Air (1932), the first half of the chapter goes on to analyse how Garnett’s texts present an aesthetics of flight that hinges on connections and dissonances between human, animal and machine. The second part illustrates how Garnett’s aeronautical writing extended to the context of war and the publication of War in the Air (1941), which he wrote for the Air Ministry. By avoiding associations that had by the Second World War become bound up in nationalist bombast, Garnett subverts the increasingly masculinist and militarist approach to technology and animality found in other writings as the decade progressed.

This chapter considers Virginia Woolf’s experiments in animal biography. It opens by presenting Woolf’s unpublished draft ‘Authorities’ note to Flush: A Biography (1933) as evidence of her knowing engagement with anthropomorphism and anthropocentrism, before going on to read that text alongside her first experiment in the genre, Orlando: A Biography (1928). In doing so, the chapter draws on correspondence between Woolf and Vita Sackville-West, as well as the latter’s rarely discussed book Faces: Profiles of Dogs (1961), to illustrate how canine companions take centre stage in their amorous discourse. It then turns to another overlooked intertext, Thomas Browne’s 1646 Pseudodoxia Epidemica, also known as Vulgar Errors, to show Woolf’s queering of his early modern belief that hares can change sex from female to male. Finally, the chapter places Flush in dialogue with a lesser-known dog biography the Woolfs considered for publication at the Hogarth Press (and which Woolf cleverly alludes to in her canine biography): Inordinate (?) Affection: A Story for Dog Lovers (1936) by composer, memoirist and suffragette Ethel Smyth.

The first chapter focuses on Leonard Woolf’s journey from colonialist civil servant working on behalf of the British Empire in Ceylon, to writer and celebrated anti-imperialist. Looking closely at his correspondence and autobiographical reflections on the years 1904 to 1911, as well as the novel, The Village in the Jungle (1913), written upon his return to England, it details how Woolf’s encounters with animals gradually disrupt his human- and European-centred worldview. The chapter begins by examining Woolf’s role in both facilitating and partaking in the hunting of big game, through which his early attraction to shooting animals shifted to forceful critique of its imperialist, anthropocentric and commercial dimensions. It then explains how hunting in Woolf’s first novel is associated with gendered and racial violence. In the process, Woolf is placed in dialogue with postcolonial theory and histories of trophy hunting, and his approach is compared to that of George Orwell, Harry Storey and John Still among others.

This chapter focuses on E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India (1924) to explore Forster’s repeated, if sometimes reluctant, interest in modes of animality that threaten to unravel his humanism and complicate what critics, most notably Edward Said, have claimed to be his orientalising descriptions of the country and its people. It begins by looking at Forster’s depiction of beetles and wasps in the novel, examining how his later paratextual notes, added in 1942, undercut taxonomic precision. When placed in the context of the rise in popular entomology, Forster’s ‘unentomological’ approach to insects emerges as an important aesthetic feature of the novel. In part, it signals Forster’s hesitancy to impose western systems of knowledge on India, while it also differentiates his use of beastly language from writings by René Maran and Mulk Raj Anand. Bringing in intertextual material from Forster’s earlier novel Howards End (1910) and later account of visits to India, The Hill of Devi (1953), the chapter goes on to explore how he stages encounters with vaguely understood animal figures in which his anti-imperialism becomes, ironically, clearer.

Pairing David Garnett’s A Man in the Zoo (1924) with Franz Kafka’s ‘A Report to an Academy’ (1917), this chapter demonstrates how both writers troubled species boundaries by drawing on historical shifts in the public display of human and nonhuman beings. The first part explores how Garnett’s story of a man who volunteers to be caged between a chimpanzee and an orang-utan offers an ironic transformation structured around abrupt plot turns and taxonomic confusion. Here Garnett exposes hierarchies of both gender and species and offers glimpses of more ethical creaturely relations. The second half of the chapter brings Kafka’s story of an ape who learns to behave like a human into a critique of animal capture and zoological trade, in particular concerning Carl Hagenbeck’s business. Hagenbeck is subtly alluded to in Garnett’s novella, where the historical phenomenon of animal spectatorship informs his satirical depiction of London’s zoo, even as his treatment of race and human exhibition remains ambivalent. The section brings to light material from Hagenbeck’s own writings and newspaper coverage, alongside literary connections to Samuel Butler, John Collier and Louis MacNeice.