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Se vedi una luce danzare sull'acqua: Lettere tra sorelle 1904-1941
Se vedi una luce danzare sull'acqua è la raccolta, a cura di Liliana Rampello, delle lettere tra Vanessa Bell e Virginia Woolf. Una corrispondenza in gran parte inedita in Italia, che racconta circa quarant'anni di vita di due le passioni e le delusioni, i successi letterari e artistici, le tragedie private e gli echi delle due guerre mondiali.
Le incontriamo che hanno poco più di vent'anni, le sorelle Vanessa si preoccupa affettuosamente della salute di Virginia, le annuncia la sua visita a Londra, la conforta per il crollo nervoso che l'ha appena colpita. Ne ha quasi sessanta, invece, Virginia, quando scrive alla sorella maggiore il suo biglietto di poche frasi, colme di disperazione, nelle quali si intravede un amore che non ha mai smesso di brillare. Tra questi due messaggi c'è una vita intera, trascorsa scrivendosi ogni volta che per qualche ragione erano distanti. Frase dopo frase, Virginia e Vanessa passano da ragazze a adulte, e da adulte a donne mature; si confrontano sulla scrittura dell'una e sulla pittura dell'altra; si confessano gli innamoramenti e le gioie – oltre che le noie – dei rispettivi matrimoni e famiglie; si scambiano pettegolezzi e tenerezze, invidie e gelosie; si abbracciano dopo i lutti e negli abissi della depressione. Nel fare tutto ciò si ritraggono, inevitabilmente, l'una con le parole dell' le loro sono lettere spontanee, ironiche, disinibite, scritte in una lingua scintillante da cui affiora tutta la grandezza e la fragilità di due personalità irripetibili, ma anche il brusio spregiudicato della cerchia di Bloomsbury.
Questo epistolario è l'inedita biografia di un rapporto umano indissolubile, qualcosa che è più della somma di due qualcosa che sta tra due vite.
Le incontriamo che hanno poco più di vent'anni, le sorelle Vanessa si preoccupa affettuosamente della salute di Virginia, le annuncia la sua visita a Londra, la conforta per il crollo nervoso che l'ha appena colpita. Ne ha quasi sessanta, invece, Virginia, quando scrive alla sorella maggiore il suo biglietto di poche frasi, colme di disperazione, nelle quali si intravede un amore che non ha mai smesso di brillare. Tra questi due messaggi c'è una vita intera, trascorsa scrivendosi ogni volta che per qualche ragione erano distanti. Frase dopo frase, Virginia e Vanessa passano da ragazze a adulte, e da adulte a donne mature; si confrontano sulla scrittura dell'una e sulla pittura dell'altra; si confessano gli innamoramenti e le gioie – oltre che le noie – dei rispettivi matrimoni e famiglie; si scambiano pettegolezzi e tenerezze, invidie e gelosie; si abbracciano dopo i lutti e negli abissi della depressione. Nel fare tutto ciò si ritraggono, inevitabilmente, l'una con le parole dell' le loro sono lettere spontanee, ironiche, disinibite, scritte in una lingua scintillante da cui affiora tutta la grandezza e la fragilità di due personalità irripetibili, ma anche il brusio spregiudicato della cerchia di Bloomsbury.
Questo epistolario è l'inedita biografia di un rapporto umano indissolubile, qualcosa che è più della somma di due qualcosa che sta tra due vite.
456 pages, Kindle Edition
Published October 22, 2024
2 people are currently reading
52 people want to read
About the author
Vanessa Bell
43 books19 followersVanessa Bell was born in Hyde Park Gate, London, the eldest child of the eminent literary scholar and critic Leslie Stephen and his second wife Julia Duckworth. At the time of Vanessa's birth Stephen was engaged as editor of the multi-volume Dictionary of National Biography and his was a home wherein intellectual pursuit, particularly of a literary kind, was encouraged. Besides Vanessa there were three other children, Thoby, Adrian and Virginia, and Virginia (later to become Woolf) would most evidence this literary influence. But there was broadness of cultural pursuit, and Vanessa's interest in drawing was approved whilst she was young, and lead to her attending the Royal Academy Schools for a more formal training in art.
Despite such broadness of cultural interests the household was socially, in many ways a conventional one; and to a degree - or so Vanessa would come to feel – hide-bound in its social customs and expectations. After her father's death in 1904, Vanessa instigated a move to 46 Gordon Square, Bloomsbury. Here she and her siblings would live a life of less constrained conventionality. They held 'at homes' to which they invited their friends, and soon it was understood by those attending that not only were there few topics of conversation out of bounds, but a certain tenor of conversation – irreverent, ironic and above all psychologically honest – was expected. From these informal gatherings there emerged a core set of people - the Stephen children, Lytton Strachey, Clive Bell, Leonard Woolf, Duncan Grant and David Garnett amongst them - to which the name 'Bloomsbury' would become attached.
Vanessa married the art-critic Clive Bell. They had two sons, Julian and Quentin, but their marital relationship did not last and for much of their lives they lived apart. They nevertheless maintained close, and for the most part affectionate relations - even during a brief affair which Vanessa had with Roger Fry, a friend, fellow art-critic and sometime professional colleague of Clive's. This affair was short lived, and Vanessa's affections were soon directed towards the artist Duncan Grant with whom she was to have her third child Angelica, born in 1919.
Both Roger Fry and Duncan Grant each had an influence on Vanessa's art. Duncan in more personal ways: she felt spurred to create by him, his influence the result of an eroticised attachment. But theirs was also a collegial relationship: they undertook commissions together for The Omega Workshops, a Bloomsbury venture which sought to supply items of well-designed household artefacts for sale to the public, and they often worked on the same project such as decorating the rooms at their Sussex home Charleston Farmhouse. Theirs was a working relationship not without ambivalence: whilst Vanessa welcomed his creative energies and vision she feared being exposed too much to his influence, and occasionally felt that her own endeavours might be eclipsed by his.
Fry's influence was less directly personal. Fry had a deep interest in modern French art - indeed it was he who was first to introduce Manet and Post-Impressionism to a scandalised British art establishment when he curated the two exhibitions of their works in 1910 and 1912 respectively. And Vanessa found these exhibitions of profound influence: she began to experiment with strong colours and a bold reductionism in her paintings, and much of her most radical work can be traced to the influence of the Post-Impressionists exhibiting just before the war. She would later return to more traditional methods of representation, but a strength of colour would always characterise her work, and it is as a colourist for which she is now perhaps most admired.
Vanessa Bell was a central member of Bloomsbury – in many ways she was the social linchpin which sustained and maintained the group. Writing to her in 1912, Roger Fry says: 'I imagine all your gestures….and how all around you people will dare to be themselves and talk o
Despite such broadness of cultural interests the household was socially, in many ways a conventional one; and to a degree - or so Vanessa would come to feel – hide-bound in its social customs and expectations. After her father's death in 1904, Vanessa instigated a move to 46 Gordon Square, Bloomsbury. Here she and her siblings would live a life of less constrained conventionality. They held 'at homes' to which they invited their friends, and soon it was understood by those attending that not only were there few topics of conversation out of bounds, but a certain tenor of conversation – irreverent, ironic and above all psychologically honest – was expected. From these informal gatherings there emerged a core set of people - the Stephen children, Lytton Strachey, Clive Bell, Leonard Woolf, Duncan Grant and David Garnett amongst them - to which the name 'Bloomsbury' would become attached.
Vanessa married the art-critic Clive Bell. They had two sons, Julian and Quentin, but their marital relationship did not last and for much of their lives they lived apart. They nevertheless maintained close, and for the most part affectionate relations - even during a brief affair which Vanessa had with Roger Fry, a friend, fellow art-critic and sometime professional colleague of Clive's. This affair was short lived, and Vanessa's affections were soon directed towards the artist Duncan Grant with whom she was to have her third child Angelica, born in 1919.
Both Roger Fry and Duncan Grant each had an influence on Vanessa's art. Duncan in more personal ways: she felt spurred to create by him, his influence the result of an eroticised attachment. But theirs was also a collegial relationship: they undertook commissions together for The Omega Workshops, a Bloomsbury venture which sought to supply items of well-designed household artefacts for sale to the public, and they often worked on the same project such as decorating the rooms at their Sussex home Charleston Farmhouse. Theirs was a working relationship not without ambivalence: whilst Vanessa welcomed his creative energies and vision she feared being exposed too much to his influence, and occasionally felt that her own endeavours might be eclipsed by his.
Fry's influence was less directly personal. Fry had a deep interest in modern French art - indeed it was he who was first to introduce Manet and Post-Impressionism to a scandalised British art establishment when he curated the two exhibitions of their works in 1910 and 1912 respectively. And Vanessa found these exhibitions of profound influence: she began to experiment with strong colours and a bold reductionism in her paintings, and much of her most radical work can be traced to the influence of the Post-Impressionists exhibiting just before the war. She would later return to more traditional methods of representation, but a strength of colour would always characterise her work, and it is as a colourist for which she is now perhaps most admired.
Vanessa Bell was a central member of Bloomsbury – in many ways she was the social linchpin which sustained and maintained the group. Writing to her in 1912, Roger Fry says: 'I imagine all your gestures….and how all around you people will dare to be themselves and talk o
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
March 27, 2025
Raccolta di una minima parte della corrispondenza durata una quarantina d’anni fra due sorelle molto speciali, le sorelle Stephen, che col matrimonio diverranno Vanessa Bell e Virginia Woolf. La prima eccellerà nella pittura, la seconda nella scrittura.
Lettere molto interessanti che permettono di entrare nella vita di tutti i giorni di queste due donne.
Resoconti di viaggi (Francia, Italia e Spagna), di ricevimenti, di visite a musei, di preoccupazioni di vario genere, dai piccoli contrasti con le domestiche fino all’imminente guerra.
Lettera di Virginia a Vanessa del 28 settembre 1938:
“Siamo in attesa di ascoltare il discorso di Chamberlain previsto per il pomeriggio,per cui non so ancora se ci sarà la guerra o meno…Ieri siamo stati a Londra e lì tutti danno la guerra per scontata. Stavano scavando trincee nei parchi. “
Si è immersi nelle loro vite e nel contempo si ha un quadro della situazione storica dei primi quarant’anni del secolo scorso.
Lettere molto interessanti che permettono di entrare nella vita di tutti i giorni di queste due donne.
Resoconti di viaggi (Francia, Italia e Spagna), di ricevimenti, di visite a musei, di preoccupazioni di vario genere, dai piccoli contrasti con le domestiche fino all’imminente guerra.
Lettera di Virginia a Vanessa del 28 settembre 1938:
“Siamo in attesa di ascoltare il discorso di Chamberlain previsto per il pomeriggio,per cui non so ancora se ci sarà la guerra o meno…Ieri siamo stati a Londra e lì tutti danno la guerra per scontata. Stavano scavando trincee nei parchi. “
Si è immersi nelle loro vite e nel contempo si ha un quadro della situazione storica dei primi quarant’anni del secolo scorso.
December 17, 2025
Se vedi una luce danzare sull’acqua, sono io. La luce ti bacia il naso, poi gli occhi, e puoi cacciarla; tesoro mio, quanto bene ti voglio, solo Dio sa che cosa significhi per me entrare nella stanza e trovarti lì seduta.
Virginia a Vanessa,
17 agosto 1937
Virginia a Vanessa,
17 agosto 1937
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews