Presents three hundred letters of Bloomsbury's painter Vanessa Bell from the 1880s to 1961.

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 ides the letters chronologically, and introduces each section with scene-setting biographical details.

Photographs, some barely known, on the domestic lives of Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) and Vanessa Bell (1879-1961) and the historical, cultural and artistic milieux of their circle in Bloomsbury, including Vivienne Eliot, Vita Sackville-West, Lady Ottoline Morrell and Dora Carrington.

This compelling new study reveals, for the first time, through an emplaced investigation, the potential of Charleston and Monk's House to illuminate the shared histories of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell.

A profile of the work of Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant.

Vanessa Bell, artist, sister of Virginia Woolf, wife of Clive Bell and lover of Duncan Grant, is one of the most fascinating and modern figures of the Bloomsbury set, but unlike most of them she rarely put pen to writing paper. When she did, she was witty and illuminating about their early lives. The eldest of the Stephen family, she grew up with Virginia in Victorian gloom at Hyde Park Gate and later blossomed in bohemian style in Bloomsbury. From the twenties to the forties she lived and painted at Charleston Farmhouse like a heroine of the sixties and seventies, at the centre of a colourful world of family, friends, artists and intellectuals. Sketches in Pen and Ink is a unique collection of largely unpublished memoirs - most of them written to be read at meetings of the Memoir club, in which Vanessa writes with wit and charm about herself, her childhood, her remarkable family and friends, her moving relationship with Roger Fry, and her art. Her daughter, Angelica Garnett, has written a vivid and personal introduction which adds considerably to our understanding of this extraordinary woman and artist.