Bloomsbury Heritage chronicles the lives of a selection of immediate ancestors of the Bloomsbury Group's members: the seven Pattle sisters, who included Julia Cameron, famous for her photographic portraits of the Victorian great such as Darwin and Tennyson; Julia Jackson Duckworth Stephen, whose memorial was carved by her daughter Virginia Woolf in the characters of Mrs. Ambrose, Mrs. Hilbery, and Mrs. Ramsay. Jane Grant Strachey, Lytton Strachey's mother, circulated the first petition to Parliament for votes for women, which was presented to Parliament in 1868 by none other than John Stuart Mill. Anne Ritchie, whose father was William Makepeace Thackeray, achieved a singular distinction in her own writing, and was a familiar friend of practically everybody who was anybody in the literary and artistic world of the Victorian era. Her niece, Mary Warre-Cornish MacCarthy, was herself an important member of the Bloomsbury Group, whose position in it has been overshadowed by her husband, Desmond MacCarty.

Quoting from many of their diaries and writings, Elizabeth Boyd sketches the lives and careers of these women and their families to bring the British Empire--especially British India--into the immediate background of the Bloomsbury Group and to help explain the existence of its innermost circle, the Memoir Club.