Bloomsbury Recalled

In Bloomsbury Recalled, Quentin Bell has written an extraordinary memoir of the circle of intellectuals in London early in this century know as the Bloomsbury group. Bell offers remarkable judgments about and recollections of each of the notable people among whom he came of age. Here are Bell's candid portraits of his parents, Clive and Vanessa Bell - Virginia Woolf's sister - Vanessa's lover, Duncan Grant, and of Virginia Woolf, Lytton Strachey, E. M. Forster, John Maynard Keynes, Roger Fry, Ottoline Morrell, and others who frequented Gordon Square in Bloomsbury and Charleston, the Bells' country place in Sussex. The stories of this enchanting extended family, the private lives of these public figures, have all the magic and intrigue of the best novels of the day. Bloomsbury Recalled, in the expansive storytelling tradition of the early modernists, re-creates the captivating theater of events that was Bloomsbury.

Publishers Weekly

One of the last surviving members of the Bloomsbury circle, Bell, painter, sculptor and art critic, offers a disarmingly candid portrait gallery of major and peripheral Bloomsbury figures. His father, Clive Bell, married the author's mother, Vanessa Stephen (Virginia Woolf's sister) in 1907 but "from 1916 Clive was hardly part of the family." He pursued love affairs while Vanessa, after a clandestine affair with art critic Roger Fry, lived openly with bisexual painter Duncan Grant, with whom she had a daughter, Angelica. Clive, Duncan and Vanessa were reunited under one roof in 1939, and the author conveys a sense of the emotional strain of growing up in "a multi-parent family." Acclaimed biographer of his aunt, Virginia Woolf, Bell here defends her as a feminist and pacifist. Along with chapters on John Maynard Keynes, Ottoline Morrell and art historian/spy Anthony Blunt, there are glimpses of Lytton Strachey, novelist David Garnett (Angelica's husband) and Dame Ethel Smyth, who fell in love with Virginia Woolf. Illustrations not seen by PW. (Mar.)

The younger son of Vanesa and Clive Bell, Quentin Bell was born in 1910. He is a painter, sculptor, potter, author and art critic and has been professor of fine art at Oxford; and professor of history and theory of art at Sussex. His books include On Human Finery, and the two-volume Virginia Woolf: A Biography, which won the Duff Cooper Memorial Prize, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and is the stadard biography of Woolf, who was his mother's sister.