HAVE you seen the film The Hours, celebrating the life of Virginia Woolf, and featuring an Oscar-winning performance by Nicole Kidman?

It's not generally known that Virginia and the Bloomsbury set visited Studland.

In London, it was joked, they "lived in squares and loved in triangles".

They were free spirits, sometimes teasingly known as the Bloomsberries. Various members were photographed or painted at Studland.

They were talented writers, philosophers and artists. The nucleus was the sisters, Vanessa and Virginia Stephen, artist and writer respectively, better known by their married names.

Vanessa married the art critic Clive Bell, and Virginia the writer Leonard Woolf. From 1906 they held discussion evenings at their Bloomsbury homes. They led a lively social life.

The Bloomsberries, as an encyclopaedia puts it, "questioned accepted ideas with a comprehensive irreverence for all kinds of sham."

Many of the circle were sexually wide-ranging in their contacts. Several were bisexual. The assembled Bloomsberries extended to the novelist E M Forster, the writer Lytton Strachey, the economist John Maynard Keynes, the painter and art critic Roger Fry and the artist Duncan Grant.

Virginia had been engaged to Lytton Strachey in 1909, but both changed their minds almost immediately.

From 1910 until about 1914, the Bloomsberries rented houses at Studland. In 1910, Virginia was at Harbour View and, in 1911, at 2 Harmony Cottages.

Studland was peaceful. A writer describes it early in the 20th century as "a fashionable resort".

In a letter of 1909 she writes from The Cottage, Studland: "Julian rushes straight into the sea. Nessa tucks her skirt up. Clive dives from a boat in a tight black suit. Yesterday I hired a gentleman's - it was bi-sexual - bathing dress, and swam far out, until the seagulls played over my head."

In 1910, Virginia wrote, "we had two splendid weeks at Studland."

In 1911, she wrote, "Roger has been here, and we made a great expedition to Poole and got taken on a tug with two barges up to Wareham, which is one of the most lovely towns I have ever seen."

In 1913 Virginia stayed at Harbour View. She married Leonard Woolf that year. According to Vanessa, Virginia "never had understanding or sympathised with sexual passion in men."

The Woolves, as they inevitably became known, revisited Studland and stayed at The Knoll, which had been rented by Maynard Keynes, in 1923, the nucleus of today's Knoll House Hotel.

The Bloomsbury group dissolved by 1930.

The Woolves had bought a country house at Rodmell in Sussex.

Why did Virginia Woolf come to Studland? She suffered periodically from mental illness and went there as a relief from London.

In 1941, Virginia sensed another attack coming on. In the River Ouse, near Rodmell, she weighed herself down with stones, and drowned.