VANESSA AND HER SISTER by Priya Parmar (fic)

Parmar has set her novel in pre-war WWI London and it spans eight years, 1905-1912, in the life of Vanessa Stephens Bell and her sisiter Virginia Stephens Woolf.  These two beautiful and talented sisters were forerunners of the new freedom young woman were espousing by the end of the war.  Vanessa, two and a half years older than Virgina, was a soon to be renowned painter, and of course, Virginia is lionized even today for her feminist novels and essays.  The girls were quite young when their mother, who was a great beauty in her own right died, and by the time their father died in 1904, they were daring enough to move out of the family home and into bohemian digs in Bloomsbury, which was becoming the center of literary London.  Leaving their Duckworth half sibling brothers (later revealed to have molested the sisters), they settled in Gordon Square with their own brothers, the handsome and adored Thoby and Adrian who was still a student at Oxford.  Once established, their home became a center for writers and artists creating a brilliant circle of friends, names which are still admired today such as: Maynard Keynes, Morgan Forster, Duncan Grant, Roger Fry, and Litton Strachey.  We follow the varied and tangled relationships among this expanding group of friends with their open marriages and numerous romances.

Parmar tells her story in the form of letters and a diary kept by Vanessa who is the main character in the book.  The story is largely seen through her eyes.  She provides an excellent and realistic dialogue, always a dodgy task when dealing with reputable and brilliant artists and writers.  The story ends before the war and the many liasons within this small circle of friends through the decades of the 20s and into the early 40s.  Vanessa marries Clive Bell early in the novel, and the story ends with Virginia's marriage to Leonard Woolf.

I enjoyed the novel, and the characters rang true with the exception of Virginia.  Her portrayal is curiously one sided.  Virgina had bouts of manic activity and depression, and she surely was difficult and unruly for her patient sister.  She carried on a strangely platonic affair with Clive Bell, Vanessa's husband.  However, she is presented as consistently weak and manipulative and a drain to all around her.  The author never shows her intensely brilliant side or her rising fame as a writer.  A much more rounded picture of the sisters was written by Vanessa's son Quentin Bell in a book called, "Such Good Friends."  Other good biographies are by Michael Holroyd and through the diaries of Dora Carrington, or the most recent by Viviane Forrester.