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73rd out of 83 books
—
18 voters
Virginia Woolf And Vanessa Bell
by
Jane Dunn
This is the story of a deep and close relationship between two sisters - Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell. The influence they exerted over each others lives, their competitiveness, the fierce love they had for each other and also their intense rivalry is explored here with subtlety and compassion. The thoughts, motives and actions of these two remarkably artistic women who...more
Published
(first published 1990)
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I love biographies. I especially love biographies of women and what's not to love about Virginia and Vanessa together in a book? A great deal of research has gone into this book and to good effect. The personal papers of these complex history making women have yielded treasure.
What I found disappointing was the author's apparent difficulty at coming to grips with the sexual abuse reported by Virginia as having occurred in her childhood. I came to this book with a vague sense of Virginia's life...more
What I found disappointing was the author's apparent difficulty at coming to grips with the sexual abuse reported by Virginia as having occurred in her childhood. I came to this book with a vague sense of Virginia's life...more
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Someone I worked with had this quote on their desk (or something very like it):
'As soon as I can find the time I am going to have a nervous breakdown. I deserve it and no one is going to deprive me of it.'
It was not entirely a joke; it was also a recognition that one's emotional needs do not always come first.
In the Stephen's household women's emotional needs did not come first and were usually unrecognised as existing at all. Their role was to care for the emotional needs of the men and the men...more
'As soon as I can find the time I am going to have a nervous breakdown. I deserve it and no one is going to deprive me of it.'
It was not entirely a joke; it was also a recognition that one's emotional needs do not always come first.
In the Stephen's household women's emotional needs did not come first and were usually unrecognised as existing at all. Their role was to care for the emotional needs of the men and the men...more
The author considers the relationship between sisters Virgina Woolf and Vanessa Bell as a way of understanding their lives and work. The first several chapters of the book trace their early lives and chapters after that address topics of work, marriage, children, etc. I was very interested in what the author had to say, particularly in the first half of the book. I didn't realize that Vanessa was the model for one of the characters in The Voyage Out, for example, or how the differences in their...more
I read this years ago and decided to reread it after reading Sellers' Vanessa and Virginia, which clearly relies heavily on it (as Sellers says in her acknowledgements). Dunn doesn't take a straight chronological approach; she examines the sisters' lives and relationship thematically, showing how they were both rivals and conspirators and how their lives revolved around each other's in so many ways. It's an excellent book, and I think I got even more out of it this time after having read more ab...more
Given the potential in the subject matter, this was really not very well-written at all. Fabulous pictures, some truly interesting anecdotes I hadn't yet heard about via other sources, but lousy writing. So disappointing.
It reads like a competent but otherwise uninspiring English essay -- you know how, in high school or thereabouts, the style with essays is to make a point at the beginning of the paper and then re-hash it again in different words for the conclusion? And continue doing so on a s...more
It reads like a competent but otherwise uninspiring English essay -- you know how, in high school or thereabouts, the style with essays is to make a point at the beginning of the paper and then re-hash it again in different words for the conclusion? And continue doing so on a s...more
Oct 13, 2010
Elizabeth
rated it
3 of 5 stars
·
review of another edition
Shelves:
virginia-obsession
I remember very little about this book - just enough to be delighted whenever I stumble across Vanessa's work in a museum.
Some fascinating observations/speculations but rather repetitive.
Some new facts (to me) but as said before it's rather repetitive and twenty years of Vanessa Bell living without her sister Virginia Woolf shrunken to a few pages :/ ?
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Jane Dunn is a leading biographer, the author of Moon in Eclipse: A Life of Mary Shelley, A Very Close Conspiracy: Vanessa Bell and Virginia Wolf, and Antonia White: A Life. Elizabeth and Mary: Cousins, Rivals, Queens was published in the spring of 2003 and spent seven weeks in the top ten of the Sunday Times bestseller list. A fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, Dunn lives near Bath with h...more
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