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.

"Bloomsbury on the Mediterranean," is how Vanessa Bell described France in a letter to her sister, Virginia Woolf. Remarking on the vivifying effect of Cassis, Woolf herself said, "I will take my mind out of its iron cage and let it swim.... Complete heaven, I think it." Yet until now there has never been a book that focused on the profound influence of France on the Bloomsbury group. In Bloomsbury and France: Art and Friends, Mary Ann Caws and Sarah Bird Wright reveal the crucial importance of the Bloomsbury group's frequent sojourns to France, the artists and writers they met there, and the liberating effect of the country itself. Drawing upon many previously unpublished letters, memoirs, and photographs, the book illuminates the artistic development of Virginia and Leonard Woolf, Clive Bell, David Garnett, E. M. Forster, Lytton Strachey, Dora Carrington, and others. The authors cover all aspects of the Bloomsbury experience in France, from the specific influence of French painting on the work of Roger Fry, Duncan Grant, and Vanessa Bell, to the heady atmosphere of the medieval Cistercian Abbaye de Pontigny, the celebrated meeting place of French intellectuals where Lytton Strachey, Julian Bell, and Charles Mauron mingled with writers and critics, to the relationships between the Bloomsbury group and Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Gertrude Stein, Andre Gide, Jean Marchand, and many others. Caws and Wright argue that Bloomsbury would have been very different without France, that France was their anti-England, a culture in which their eccentricities and aesthetic experiments could flower. This remarkable study offers a rich new perspective on perhaps the most creative group of artists and friends in the 20th century.

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.

'Prepare to be dazzled' Paula McLain, author of The Paris Wife 'One of the essential reads of the year' The Times London, 1905. The city is alight with change and the Stephen siblings are at the forefront. Vanessa, Virginia, Thoby and Adrian are leaving behind their childhood home and taking a house in the leafy heart of avant-garde Bloomsbury. There they bring together a glittering circle of brilliant, artistic friends who will come to be known as the legendary Bloomsbury Group. And at the centre of the charmed circle are the devoted, gifted sisters: Vanessa, the painter and Virginia, the writer. Each member of the group will go on to earn fame and success, but so far Vanessa Bell has never sold a painting. Virginia Woolf's book review has just been turned down by The Times. Lytton Strachey has not published anything. E. M. Forster has finished his first novel but does not like the title. Leonard Woolf is still a civil servant in Ceylon, and John Maynard Keynes is looking for a job. Together, this sparkling coterie of artists and intellectuals throw away convention and embrace the wild freedom of being young, single bohemians in London. But the landscape shifts when Vanessa unexpectedly falls in love and her sister feels dangerously abandoned. Eerily possessive, charismatic, manipulative and brilliant, Virginia has always lived in the shelter of Vanessa's constant attention and encouragement. Without it, she careens toward self-destruction and madness. As tragedy and betrayal threaten to destroy the family, Vanessa must choose whether to protect Virginia's happiness or her own.

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