Blood Bonds

“Lived in squares, painted in circles, loved in triangles.” is how Dorothy Parker described the Bloomsbury Group, a group of artists and intellectuals active in the first half of the 20th century who shared a commitment to aesthetic experimentation and personal freedom away from the strict Victorian ideals they inherited. Though Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant, and Roger Fry firmed the crux of the group, this article sheds light on the significance of the sister duo - Vanessa Bell and Virginia Woolf.

Their Roots

They had a privileged upbringing, born in London to the critic and historian Sir Leslie Stephen and Julia Stephen who was known for her beauty, intelligence and social work.

After the death of her mother and her elder half sister Stella, Bell took on the role of the wife and mother while led by the patriarch- her father. After her father's death she made immediate plans to clear the family home and nice house, to travel and to paint. Eventually she moved to Gordon Square in Bloomsbury, joined by Virginia and their brother Thoby and his friends from Cambridge who were invited to regular “Thursday evenings”. This was the beginning of the creation of the Bloomsbury group which centred around art, literature and a sense of community.

The two sisters were at the heart of the intellectual conversations, Vanessa being the one who brings people together and Virginia being the life of the party. The group included their younger brother Adrian, Lytton Strachey, Clive Bell, Maynard Keynes, Leonard Woolf, Desmond, Molly MacCarthy and Roger Fry. She had houses in London, the English countryside and the South of France where she hosted others. Later she and her partner Duncan Grant would set up the Charleston farmhouse in Sussex, in which they painted on the furniture, walls, doors and other surfaces blurring the line between high art and interior design.

Both were brought up with Victorian ideals which entailed rigid gender roles, sexual repression and emotional restraint. Their lives were spent subverting all those influences and reclaiming their voice. Each chose their own domain to dominate.

Both were masters of their own distinct medium of expression

Vanessa Bell artwork extends to many subjects and mediums and a constant experimentation with techniques but the most revolutionary were her oil portraits of women in domestic spaces created during the emergence of New Feminism. She expressed as she observed and lived her life. Self contained independent women who exercised their own agency while balancing mundane activities and her roles in society.

Virginia Woolf was exposed to the world of writing from a young age as she grew up in a family that valued intellectual pursuits. Her father was a writer, critic and philosopher. She was outspoken, witty and was highly impacted by her personal relationships and the Bloomsbury Group's preoccupation with modernism, intellectual freedom and nonconformity which can be seen in her works that explore non linear narrative structures. Her work explores class, gender politics and the human psyche which has had a profound effect in modernist and feminist literature.

Their Complex Relationship

Writer Virginia Woolf and painter Vanessa Bell experimented with their style and influenced each other's work. Which led to a lifelong meeting of minds and also rivalry. Vanessa is ubiquitous in Virginia’s letters, diary entries and writing. Their relationship was bound by mutual admiration and competition and attachment and distance along with mutual care and support.

Each had shared experiences of losing their mother at a young age, sexual assault by their half brother George Duckworth and their stoic Victorian upbringing.

Vanessa’s multiple portraits of Virginia and her deep impact on her work shows the deep intertwined nature of their relationship. “Nessa and I formed together a close conspiracy. In that world of many men, coming and going in that big house with innumerable rooms, we formed our private nucleus.”wrote Woolf. Bells’s grounding influence, her nurture during Woolf’s periods of mental breakdowns and the power of her art influenced Woolf greatly, as she wrote, “Nessa has all that I should like to have, a largeness, a physicality and fecundity that extended beyond her creativity in canvas and paint.”

They were involved in many joint creative projects within the Bloomsbury Group. They collaborated through the Hogarth Press, which was a British publishing house founded in 1917 by Virginia Woolf and her husband, Leonard, where Vanessa would often create book jackets and inner pages of her publications. Vanessa Bell included Virginia as one of the many women she would paint for the iconic work Famous Women Dinner Service, a set of fifty dinner plates commissioned by Kenneth Clark, a British historian.

Conclusion

Women weren't secondary figures in the Bloomsbury group- they were the heart of its intellectual and emotional engines. Bloomsbury was known for its fluidity but at the very centre of that fluidity was the grounding influence of both the Stephen sisters without whom the group would have dispersed much sooner than it did. Their legacy lives on and is emblematic of women and their role in bringing together a community while also maintaining their work as a central part of their lives no matter the constant flux or their emotional bonds. They established their reputation as female thinkers and creators and challenged the patriarchal structures in the intellectual world.