In the mid-1970s, middle-aged Garnett - daughter of Vanessa Bell
and Duncan Grant, ex-wife of David Garnett - began to realize that
she was living in a "tangled web of repressed emotion" and started
work on this half-forgiving, half-bitter memoir. First she sketches
in the Stephen family history, the strains and bereavements
suffered by daughters Virginia and Vanessa, the formation of
Vanessa's strong yet possessive personality ("when it came to love,
she bent like a flower under the weight of a humble bee"), and the
unconventional menage that took shape: Vanessa's marriage to
philandering Clive Bell; her long-term attachment (sexually brief)
to fellow-painter Grant, whose homosexual lovers included young
David Garnett; and Angelica's birth in 1918. "I was the only person
successfully kept in the dark," says Garnett - who grew up
believing that Clive Bell (warm yet lightweight) was her father.
Vanessa, with "a black hole of impalpable depth" somewhere at the
core, was an insecure mother, forcing Angelica to repress her
feelings: "I longed for her to want me to be strong and
independent, whereas apparently all she desired was to suffocate me
with caresses." Less complicated affection came from Aunt Virginia,
from reliably stern Uncle Leonard, from grand-fatherly Roger Fry.
But then, after the Spanish Civil War death of half-brother Julian,
Angelica learned that her real father was kind, charming, yet
unfatherly Duncan: "I adored him, but the will to be his daughter
was all on my side, and was received with no more than a bland
serenity. . . My dream of the perfect father - unrealised -
possessed me, and has done so for the rest of my life." And, with
all these psychic handicaps, the 19-year-old Angelica was a sitting
duck for urbane "bulldozer" David Garnett - whose courtship didn't
include the information that he was Vanessa's bygone suitor
(rejected) as well as Duncan's bygone lover. ("He knew. . . that he
was driving a wedge between Vanessa and myself, one that in fact
remained for ever.") This memoir's first half is more descriptive
than dramatic, with evocations of Bell-family homes, trips,
relatives. And though the later chapters bunch up in revelations,
restrained confrontations, and psychoanalytic insights, Garnett
herself remains - as she notes herself - a "shadowy" presence here.
Still, as a darker complement to Frances Spalding's Vanessa Bell
(1983): edgy, thoughtful testimony from one of Bloomsbury's
innocent victims. (Kirkus Reviews)
'Passionate, lucid, risky, rash, hard to put down and impossible to forget.' Hilary Spurling, OBSERVER Angelica Garnett may truly be called a child of Bloomsbury. Her Aunt was Virginia Woolf, her mother Vanessa Bell, and her father Duncan Grant, though for many years Angelica believed herself, naturally enough, the daughter of Vanessa's husband Clive. Her childhood homes, Charleston in Sussex and Gordon Square in London, were both centres of Bloomsbury activity, and she grew up surrounded by the most talked-about writers and artists of the day - Leonard and Virginia Woolf, Roger Fry, the Stracheys, Maynard Keynes, David Garnett (whom she later married), and many others. But the book is also a record of a young girl's particular struggle to emerge from that extraordinary and intense milieu as a mature and independent woman. With an honesty that is by degrees agonising and uplifting, the author creates a vibrant, poignant picture of her mother, Vanessa Bell, of her own emergent individuality, and of the Bloomsbury era.
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