What the Fran

Collectives

Movements, groups, collective, cliques, circles, clubs, ensembles, whatever they are called I'm fascinated by people coming together and creating something. Art, philosophy, literature, science, dance, politics, all of the above, ideally. In salons and coffee houses. Publishing pamphlets and poetry, creating culture.

An introductory sort of post I wrote: Making a movement, 19th October 2025.

But I want to explore it more, in a more organised way.

Examples

Stratford-on-Odéon. James Joyce's name for the writers gathering around Adrienne Monnier's and Sylvia Beach's bookshops on the rue de l'Odéon in 1920s Paris. Joyce, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, and Ernest Hemingway.

I'm especially interested in Gertrude Stein. I have no explanation for this. Also Sylvia Beach.

As well as the wider goings-on in Paris since the turn of the century. Natalie Burney and her salons, Gertrude Stein and hers, with Romaine Brooks, Stein, Colette, and Radclyffe Hall. Diana Souhami wanted to call her book on Natalie and Romaine 'A Sapphic Idyll' but said publishers baulked at the 'Sapphic'. I baulk at the 'Idyll'. Plus F Scott Fitzgerald, Picasso, all the artists.

The Jena Set, or Jena Romantics. Kicked off Romanticism in Jena, Germany at the turn of the nineteenth century. Caroline von Schlegel, von Schlegel brothers, Fichte, Schelling, Novalis, Goethe, Alexander von Humboldt.

Blue Stockings Society, largely but not entirely women in 1750s London. From which the term bluestocking arose. Interested in women's education and social reform. Elizabeth Montagu, Angelica Kauffman.

The Harlem Renaissance, 1920s and 30s New York. Creatively wide-ranging, socially significant, and politically crucial. Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston.

The Lunar Society of the Midlands Enlightenment, a more scientific and industrialist bent. Erasmus Darwin, Josiah Wedgewood, James Watt.

Other examples

Questions

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