Volume 30, Number 20 · December 22, 1983
The Madonna of Bloomsbury
By Rosemary Dinnage
Vanessa Bell
by Frances Spalding
Ticknor and Fields, 399 pp., $22.95
As the still center of Bloomsbury, Vanessa Bell has remained something of a mystery. The volumes of Bloomsburiana have multiplied, the major and minor characters have been anatomized, but still her figure has stayed obscure. We have seen her chiefly through her sister's jealous, devoted gaze; but others tried their hands at describing her. 'Monumental, monolithic, granitic,' wrote Leonard Woolf; 'It was the strange combination of great beauty and feminine charm with a kind of lapidification of character and her caustic humour which made her such a fascinating person.' 'She was not at all dogmatic,' said Kenneth Clark, 'but she never relaxed her standards, and in a quiet, hesitant voice would expose false values and mixed motives. I was devoted to her, and when asked to do something questionable, I would think to myself 'What would Vanessa say?'' In a poem about her, her son Julian wrote of her 'calm of mind,/...Patient and sensitive, cynic and kind.' Roger Fry, deeply in love with her, wrote of the atmosphere of peace with which she surrounded people:
Review, 2174 words
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