Why read Among the Bohemians?

Book cover of Among the Bohemians: Experiments in Living 1900-1939

Book description

Virginia Nicholson's Among the Bohemians is a portrait of England's artistic community in the first half of the twentieth century, engaged in a grand experiment.

Subversive, eccentric and flamboyant - the Bohemians ate garlic and didn't always wash; they painted and danced and didn't care what people thought. They sent…

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Why read it?

2 authors picked Among the Bohemians as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Katherine Giuffre

Author

What I love about this book is the way it delves into all the intimate details of a group of artists/writers/creators in early 20th-century England who rebelled against the day-to-day strictures of a buttoned-up society and embraced eccentricity in even the most humdrum aspects of their lives.

What did they eat? What did they wear? Where did their children go to school? I wouldn’t necessarily imitate absolutely everything that these iconoclasts did, but the allure of their example is intoxicating.

From Katherine's list on maverick creativity.

Tessa Lunney

Author

It is not too much to say that this book changed my life. I found this book when I was looking for a guide, a template, for how to be a writer. This book has a hundred anecdotes of the creative life, of how to succeed and how to fail gloriously. This book ignited my obsession with the 1920s.

Nicholson writes about the life of Britain’s bohemians in the first half of the twentieth century, not from their work, but from their way of life. There are chapters on money and clothes, on cleaning and babies, on houses and travel.…

From Tessa's list on the 1920s.