Selected Letters of Vanessa Bell

Vanessa Bell was a central figure in the Bloomsbury Group. The sister of Virginia Woolf and wife of Clive Bell, she lived at what is now the shrine of the Bloomsbury Group – Charleston Manor in Sussex, as part of a “menage a trois” with her husband and the artist Duncan Grant. There are more than 3000 of Vanessa Bell’s letters which survive. This book contains more than 600 of them, spanning more than 70 years. They show her to be an extremely unconventional woman for her time. The recipients include her sister, her husband, Duncan Grant, Roger Fry and John Maynard Keynes. She writes seriously about her work, lovingly to her sister, revealingly about the Bloomsbury circle and frequently becomes bawdy. Regina Mahler divides the letters chronologically, and introduces each section with scene-setting biographical details.