Priya Parmar does a fine job of inventing Vanessa Bell’s account of life with the volatile Virginia Woolf
In this impressive novel, everyone is afraid of Virginia Woolf, particularly her elder sister, the artist Vanessa Bell, who has assumed a maternal responsibility for her troubled, brilliant sibling after the death of their parents.
In the reams of biography, memoir and fiction generated by the Bloomsbury group, Vanessa has remained elusive; perhaps because her legacy is visual rather than literary, and perhaps because she never acquired the mythos that grew up around Virginia as a tragic genius. By means of an invented diary based on Vanessa’s extensive correspondence and the memoirs of those who knew her, Priya Parmar places her centre stage and seeks to explore the inner landscape of a woman who – in this version, at least – was a steadying influence on this collection of brilliant and volatile young intellectuals.
When the novel begins in 1905 both Vanessa and Virginia are still the Miss Stephens. After the death of their father they have moved with their two brothers, Thoby and Adrian, from genteel Kensington to the “bohemian hinterland” of Bloomsbury, where they further scandalise polite society by hosting gatherings at which mixed groups of unchaperoned young people drink and argue about art and literature until the early hours. Regular guests are mainly Thoby’s friends from Cambridge, among them Lytton Strachey, Morgan Forster, Maynard Keynes, Clive Bell. In a nod to Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, the novel opens with preparations a party; Vanessa, though caught up in the thrill of throwing off social convention, clearly struggles with the need to balance their budding freedom with her sense of responsibility in a way that her more feckless younger siblings do not: “Neither Thoby, nor Adrian, nor Virginia, would ever think of anything so banal as sandwiches, or napkins, or teaspoons.”
Vanessa and Her Sister is published by Bloomsbury Circus,
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In the reams of biography, memoir and fiction generated by the Bloomsbury group, Vanessa has remained elusive; perhaps because her legacy is visual rather than literary, and perhaps because she never acquired the mythos that grew up around Virginia as a tragic genius. By means of an invented diary based on Vanessa’s extensive correspondence and the memoirs of those who knew her, Priya Parmar places her centre stage and seeks to explore the inner landscape of a woman who – in this version, at least – was a steadying influence on this collection of brilliant and volatile young intellectuals.
When the novel begins in 1905 both Vanessa and Virginia are still the Miss Stephens. After the death of their father they have moved with their two brothers, Thoby and Adrian, from genteel Kensington to the “bohemian hinterland” of Bloomsbury, where they further scandalise polite society by hosting gatherings at which mixed groups of unchaperoned young people drink and argue about art and literature until the early hours. Regular guests are mainly Thoby’s friends from Cambridge, among them Lytton Strachey, Morgan Forster, Maynard Keynes, Clive Bell. In a nod to Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, the novel opens with preparations a party; Vanessa, though caught up in the thrill of throwing off social convention, clearly struggles with the need to balance their budding freedom with her sense of responsibility in a way that her more feckless younger siblings do not: “Neither Thoby, nor Adrian, nor Virginia, would ever think of anything so banal as sandwiches, or napkins, or teaspoons.”
Vanessa and Her Sister is published by Bloomsbury Circus,
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