Selected Letters of Vanessa Bell - Hardcover

Marler, Regina

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 067941939X ISBN 13: 9780679419396

Publisher: Pantheon, 1993

Synopsis

Three hundred letters written to others in the Bloomsbury set--including Lady Ottoline Morrell, Maynard Keynes, and Lytton Strachey--reveal much about this painter and sister of Virginia Woolf

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Reviews

Painter Vanessa Bell (1879-1961) conducted an intimate correspondence with fellow members of the circle of English artists and writers known as the Bloomsbury group. Published here for the first time in this collection edited by Marler, literary editor of the journal Aleh-zon , are more than 300 of Bell's letters, written between 1885 and 1961, accompanied by biographical essays and a foreword by Bell's son, Quentin. Included are her letters written to husband Clive Bell, to friends Lytton Strachey and Maynard Keynes, and to her lovers, art critic Roger Fry and painter Duncan Grant. The letters testify to Bell's passion for painting and to her commitment to an unconventional life. Those written to her sister, the writer Virginia Woolf, express both love and concern for Woolf's precarious mental health. Bell also wrote about the devastation she experienced over the death of her son, Duncan, during World War II, and Virginia's suicide in 1941. This is a valuable addition to Bloomsbury studies. Illustrations.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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.

Edition details

• Publisher: Pantheon
• Publication date: 1993
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 067941939X
• ISBN 13: 9780679419396
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 593