The latter repeatedly prompts Woolf to return to England and marry Virginia Stephen-which, of course, he eventually does. Though Leonard Woolf was far from Bloomsbury - a civil servant in Ceylon - even his voice enters the narrative occasionally through his exchanges of correspondence with friends, including Thoby Stephen and Lytton Strachey. Forster, Roger Fry, Duncan Grant, and others.

Impressively, within the factual constraints, Parmar brings to life the voices, writing styles, idiosyncrasies, preoccupations, daily activities, and social milieu not only of Virginia and Vanessa Stephen, but of the entire cast of their siblings, friends, lovers, and acquaintances, including Adrian and Thoby Stephen, Clive Bell, Lytton Strachey, E.M. One can only imagine the daunting amount of research she undertook to establish historical accuracy for her characters’ lives and actions. They were prolific correspondents and diarists, and there is a wealth of existing primary material.” Though it was no doubt a challenge to find “enough room for invention in the negative spaces they left behind,” she has richly succeeded in that venture. A book that did not emerge from this frequently visited terrain is a journal written by Vanessa Bell, Woolf’s older sister and a painter of some renown - a missing piece of Bloomsbury that Priya Parmar brilliantly creates in her new novel, Vanessa and Her Sister.Īs the author acknowledges, “It is not easy to fictionalize the Bloomsbury Group, as their lives are so well documented.

One would think the subject had been exhausted, but not so. Readers and admirers of Virginia Woolf and her milieu are no doubt aware of the ever-expanding shelves of books - fiction, diaries, letters, biographies, essays, photo albums, scholarly books, and more - that focus on virtually every aspect of what came to be known as the Bloomsbury Group.

Vanessa and Her Sister by Priya Parmar