Sisters First: Vanessa Bell & Virginia Woolf 

Born in a particularly fractured, even divided, Victorian family, sisterhood was the foundation that writer Virginia Woolf and her older sister, painter Vanessa Bell, could always return to.

Locked between the silent pact of an incestuous stepbrother and a demanding patriarch for a father, they could only turn to each other.

Their mother died when they were young girls. Stepsister Stella took over until she died prematurely in childbirth. At this point, older sister Vanessa took over managing the large family.

Virginia adored her father. They both had brilliant minds and could spin a web of analytic discussion for hours. They never would fully understand Vanessa's love of color and her need for travel and nature; her need to nurture; sometimes even repress. He'd clench a tight fist and chastise Vanessa for ruining the family financially every month, until the next month, and so on.

Vanessa was relieved when Leslie Stephen died, relieved finally to take a trip to Europe and be on her own. Meanwhile Virginia was sinking into despair. She felt as if she was the only sibling mourning their father.

Virginia, big sister of the modern Women's Movement (if not the mother herself), loved most dearly to her heart her big sister Vanessa. Vanessa adored her younger sister and needed her approval, valued her opinion, and even envied her a bit for her outspoken intelligence. Yet Vanessa never really regarded women as highly as she regarded men. Their sisterhood was a perfect yin/yang-- Virginia "owned" the intellectual, so Vanessa "owned" the physical.

Thoby and Adrian would bring home their Cambridge friends. Virginia, gifted at intellectual discourse, shined brilliantly. Vanessa's glow was more subtle and sensual. As an artist looking to escape the dark rooms of her childhood, Vanessa turned their new home into her first showpiece of nonconformity, color and light.

Leonard fancied himself a bit in love with both sisters from time to time, and wrote of Vanessa:

• To many people she appeared frightening and formidable... I myself never found her formidable, partly because she had the most beautiful speaking voice I have ever heard, and partly because of her tranquillity and quietude. (The tranquillity was to some extent superficial; it did not extend deep down in her mind, for there in the depths there was also an extreme sensitivity, a nervous tension...)

After the sudden death of Thoby, Vanessa accepted art critic Clive Bell's third marriage proposal. Ironically, it took three proposals by Leonard to get Virginia to say yes too, but that was later.

Meanwhile, Vanessa flourished as a figure of great fecundity: bearing children, painting pictures, decorating her homes; all were done with the commitment of an artist.

With her marriage to Clive Bell, Vanessa first discovered her sexual self. When she gave birth to the first of her three children, she discovered the powerful stirrings of maternal love. Clive, feeling neglected, turned to Virginia.

They never actually had an affair (Virginia was always more comfortable with affectionate words and petting) but their flirtation wounded Vanessa deeply. Uncomfortable with words, she merely wrapped herself in her artwork and in her children.

This is the curse. Write.
--Elizabeth Barrett Browning "To George Sand"

Virginia was traumatized by Vanessa's marriage. She'd envisioned them never marrying and always living together. She felt betrayed.

• It was with a view to marriage that her mind was taught. It was with a view to marriage that she tinkled on the piano, but was not allowed to join an orchestra; sketched innocent domestic scenes, but was not allowed to study from the nude...
  --Virginia Woolf "Three Guineas"

In 1912, Virginia married Leonard Woolf. As a middle class Jew he no doubt felt set apart in this affluent, Protestant Bloomsbury group. Yet intellectually he was in synch with them and shared their obsession with Beauty (in the aesthetic rather than "earthly" way).

Vanessa had a second son with Clive, but the trade off she made was that he now had mistresses. She had traded in her sexual self for her maternal self.

She was "saved" by art critic and artist Roger Fry. He was older and had children; his wife had been declared incurably insane. He was a much needed compassionate figure to Vanessa in her brief period of need. Roger nursed her through a difficult miscarriage. He appreciated her talents and nurtured them in her. He fell deeply in love with her and for awhlile they were lovers.

On a trip to Italy and Paris consisting of the Bells, Roger Fry and Duncan Grant, Vanessa realized that she and Duncan preferred a more languid, artist's pace, whereas Clive and Roger wanted to be up and about sightseeing all the time.

Roger Fry had been so willing to give and nurture, but it had oppressed her; to Duncan, she could be the giver. For a woman trained to give and not receive, this was an infinitely more comfortable position.

Vanessa withdrew from Bloomsbury, working less and less for the Omega Workshops, and spending more and more time at Charleston, her country home with Duncan Grant, the openly gay painter with whom she had by now fallen in love.

About their life at the Charleston farm house, Virginia wrote:

• Nessa seems to have slipped civilization off her back, and splashes about entirely nude, without shame, and enormous spirit. Indeed, Clive now takes up the line that she has ceased to be a presentable lady-- I think it all works admirably.

What better a life for an artist who wanted to put art first in her life? In another letter, Virginia wrote:

• Nessa is 4 miles on the other side of the down, living like an old hen wife among ducks, chickens and children. She never wants to put on proper clothes again-- even a bath seems to distress her. Her children are forever asking her questions and she invents all sorts of answers, never having known very accurately about facts.

Duncan Grant was a truly Dioysnissian free spirit, a perfect creative partner for the more reserved Vanessa. They decorated their home like an ongoing creative project, forging a truly inspiring work and living space together. They conceived a daughter together, joining the sons she had had with Clive.

About Duncan, Virginia cannily wrote:

• He is more and more like a white owl perched upon a branch and blinking at the light, and shuffling his soft furry feet in the snow-- a wonderful creature, you must admit, though how he ever gets through life-- but as a matter of fact he gets through it better than any of us.

Creativily, Duncan and Vanessa were soul mates. To Roger she wrote excitedly of her latest project-- copying paintings by the Italian masters. She wrote, "I'm very bad at copying though I rather enjoy doing it. I think one gets to understand pictures in a way one can't otherwise."

Duncan later expounded on this to John Rothenstein, "The real idea behind copying is to induce one to look at a picture for a long time."

Roger meanwhile was licking his wounds, trying to get over the love of his life, Vanessa. He grew to appreciate the friendship and creative kinship that resurfaced after the demise of their love affair. He even understood that her creativity needed its personal freedom. He wrote to her:

• Oh, why do I admire you so?... I think you go straight for the things that are worthwhile-- you have done such an extraordinary difficult thing without any fuss; cut thro' all the conventions, kept friends with a persnickety creature like Clive, got quit of me and yet kept me your devoted friend, got all the things you need for your own development and yet managed to be a splendid mother-- no, you really can't wonder. You give one a sense of security, of something solid and real in a shifting world.

Meanwhile Leonard and Virginia Woolf's Hogarth Press was flourishing, despite Virginia's periods of instability. These could last years, leaving her ranting or immobilized, then she'd be fine-- better than fine. She'd be highly productive and insightful, never running from her demons but confronting them with raw honesty in her fiction and nonfiction works.

Leonard never seemed too bothered by her affairs with women, including Vita Sackville-West. He was, unwaveringly, a nurturing (though sometimes critical) and supportive husband.

• You have the children, the fame by rights belongs to me.
  --Virginia to Vanessa

With her Bohemian decorating style, Vanessa was consciously trying to break with what she considered the oppressive Victorian style. Really, she was trying to break from her father and create her own life. But her tendency to suppress rather than express got the better of her.

Vanessa's relationship with Duncan Grant was more difficult. Six years older than Duncan, maybe it was easy for her to assume an asexual, maternal role with him. She never seemed to mind his perpetual lateness, his sloppy demeanor, or his periods away. During those times, he'd be with his male lovers. Together, they had a daughter, Angelica.

One of Duncan's lovers was David Garnet, whom they all called Bunny. Afraid she was losing Duncan, Vanessa befriended Bunny-- much to her discomfort, because she really didn't care for him.

They were peculiar triangle living at Charleston, until Bunny eventually left to marry and start his own family. Curiously, Bunny made a second appearance in their lives. Nearly twenty years later, much to their mute horror, Bunny courted Duncan and Vannessa's daughter.

Angelica was fresh from learning that Clive (Quentin and Julian's father) wasn't really her father. Duncan --who'd been there all along-- was actually her father. She felt like an outsider in her own family (ironically unexpressed was how Vanessa and Virginia had also felt like outsiders when they were first exposed to society).

Vulnerable, she found the attentions of a worldly older man deeply flattering. With his disarmingly benign nickname --Bunny-- and the shared history he had with her parents (although she didn't know about the love affair), she succumbed.

Vanessa and Duncan let the affair continue, even when Angelica moved in with Bunny. They hoped it would run its own course. Her aunt Virginia was more adamently against the match, but nothing dissuaded Angelica. Upon the death of Bunny's wife, Angelica married Bunny.

As time wore on, Vanessa thought Angelica became too wrapped up in domesticity, neglecting herself and her creative side. But Angelica seemed happy with her life and her children.

Virginia Woolf lived through six major breakdowns before drowning herself, fearing another breakdown, in the River Ouse on March 28, 1941.

Vanessa's first son Julian had died in the Spanish Civil War. Her second son Quentin went on to a successful career in art, following the Bloomsbury-Omega tradtions.

Vanessa died of heart failure in 1961 (the year I was born).

Duncan wrote to Clive in the winter after Vanessa's death, "We have got into the local newspaper and said to be completely isolated. But Nessa would have been delighted as there is no chance of a visitor."

A former lover of Duncan's, who'd married and moved to America, moved into Charleston with Duncan.

Roger Fry was the first to go, in 1934. In 1978, Duncan was the last of Old Bloomsbury to die. He was buried next to Vanessa.

Fame
by Charolette Mew

Sometimes in the over-heated house, but not for long,
Smirking and speaking rather loud,
I see myself among the crowd,
Where no one fits the singer to his song,
Or sifts the unpainted from the painted faces
Of the people who are always on my stair;
They were no with me when I walked in heavenly places;
But could I spare
In the blind Earth's great silences and spaces,
The din, the scuffle, the long stare
If I went back and it was not there?
Back to the old known things that are the new,
The faded glory of the gorse, the sweet briar air,
To the larks that cannot praise us, knowing nothing of what we do
And the divine, wise trees that do not care
Yet, to leave Fame, still with such eyes and that bright hair!
God! If I might! And before I go hence
Take in her stead
To our tossed bed,
Our little dream, no matter how small, how wild.
Just now, I think I found it in a field, under a fence--
A frail, dead, new-born lamb, ghostly and pitiful and white,
A blot upon the night,
The moon's dropped child!

Continue...

The background graphic is a Vanessa Bell fabric design. The portrait of Virginia Woolf (top) is also by Vanessa.

An excellent Virginia Woolf (and her Bloomsbury friends) timeline is here. My compilation of related links is here.

The Germ
by Meg Wise-Lawrence