At the time of her portrait, here, Woolf was at work on her first novel, then called Melymbrosia, later published as The Voyage Out. Bell served as model for one of the novel’s main characters, Helen Ambrose. Bell would later loom large in Woolf’s masterpiece, To the Lighthouse (#2 in a BBC top 25 greatest British novels ever poll), where a painter, Lily Briscoe, is the soul of the story. Later still, Bell was Susan in Woolf’s most experimental work, The Waves (#16 in the BBC top 25).
