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Sister of Virginia Woolf, wife of critic Clive Bell, lover of painter Duncan Grant, and an accomplished artist herself, Vanessa Bell was a mainstay of the Bloomsbury group. As was only to be expected from this unconventional little group, Vanessa's personal life was a tangle of soap-opera proportions, including an illegitimate daughter fathered by Grant but raised as her husband's and a succession of Grant's male lovers among other eccentricities. Yet she was also an oddly conventional woman in many respects, maintaining her married name long after she'd deserted her husband to live with her lover, and devoting herself to her children in a shockingly (for Bloomsbury) maternal way. Though paint on canvas was her primary modality of expression, Vanessa Bell was also a talented writer, as evidenced in the
Selected Letters of Vanessa Bell.
In her introduction to the collection, editor Regina Marler writes:
To her children, her sister, her lovers, Vanessa wrote almost daily. On the whole, her reserve and shyness argued against written declarations of affection; she preferred to entertain, keeping up a teasing, ironic tone. She excelled in narratives of domestic chaos and embarrassment. She was forever spilling her inkpot down the front of her skirt, then describing the mess.
The letters selected here reflect all this and more. Writing to her friend Margery Snowden while touring Italy, she describes an elderly woman "muttering imprecations and growling at her unfortunate daughter.... Shall I shock you if I tell you of her form of oath, when her unfortunate daughter happens to offend her? 'G-d d-amn you,' she shrieks at her." Vanessa then adds, charmingly, "I think dashes may make it less shocking..." Art, literature, domestic details, and personal relationships are among the subjects Vanessa Bell touches on, and taken together, this collection provides both a self-portrait of the artist and an intimate glimpse of the remarkable circle in which she moved.
--Margaret Prior
From Kirkus Reviews
In this selection of 300-plus (from over 2500) surviving letters of Vanessa Bell (1879-1978), Marler adds a warm, modest, humane, and maternal tone to the raucous Bloomsbury chorus--to the ironies, cruelties, and wit of Virginia (Bell's sister) and Leonard Woolf, Lytton Strachey, John Maynard Keynes, Roger Fry, Duncan Grant, and Ottoline Morrell, all of whom appear in these casual letters. A painter and decorative artist, Bell wrote letters that reflect the trivia and gossip of the atheistic, unsentimental, sexually liberated Bloomsberries, to whom she was a loving and unassuming center. However self-deprecating she was about her feelings--expressed in her disheveled appearance and frugal style- -Bell's painting, aside from experiments with abstraction and her decorative murals, was aggressive, a distorted and raw realism. Devoted to her art, her husband Clive, and her lovers Roger Fry and Duncan Grant, Bell was fascinated by the ``maternal instinct'' awakened by her children: Julian, who died in the Spanish Civil War; Quentin, who became an artist (and who writes a moving prologue here); and Angelica, her daughter by Duncan who grew up to marry David ``Bunny'' Garnett, a man 26 years her senior and once her own father's lover, and to produce four daughters to delight Vanessa. The best letters here include a caricature of the Bloomsberries attending a film depicting a Caesarian section (1931); several to Julian in China (1935-37); laconic responses to Julian's death and Virginia's suicide (1941); and explicit homosexual fantasies about Keynes and Strachey cavorting with young boys. Vanessa was by her own admission a better painter than writer- -and, indeed, her letters lack the bite and wit of other Bloomsbury writings. But Marler's biographical introductions and meticulous footnotes, as well as the 25 b&w photographs, add substance. The real pleasure here is in seeing Bell mature with the century, her fashionable attitudes replaced by authentic experience. --
Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
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