Vanessa Bell is central to the history of the Bloomsbury Group, yet
until this authorised biography was written, she largely remained a
silent and inscrutable figure. Tantalising glimpses of her life appeared
mainly in her sister, Virginia Woolf's, letters, diaries and biography.
Frances Spalding here draws upon a mass of unpublished documents to
reveal Bell's extraordinary achievements in both her art and her life.
She recounts in vivid detail how Bell's move into the Bloomsbury Group
and her exposure to Paris and the radical art of the Post-Impressionists
ran parrallel with an increasingly unorthodox personal life that spun in
convoluted threads between her marriage to Clive Bell, her affair with
Roger Fry, her friendship with Duncan Grant and relationship with her
sister.