Here now is new insight into one of Bloomsbury's major figures with these more than three hundred never-before-published letters of Vanessa Bell. The daughter of the eminent Victorian writer Sir Leslie Stephen, the older sister of Virginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell was a well-known painter in her own right. Along with the art critic Roger Fry and the painter Duncan Grant, she founded the celebrated Omega Workshops, which brought their innovative and unrestrained palette to interior design. In these letters, Regina Marler takes the reader from the 1880s to 1961 - through seventy years and two world wars - documenting Bell's fascinating and often romantic relationship with her sister; accounts of life at various houses: Gordon Square, Asheham, Cassis, or Charleston; theories about the art of the time; her passionate involvements with Roger Fry and Duncan Grant - who himself would have an affair with the writer David "Bunny" Garnett, future husband of Duncan and Vanessa's daughter, Angelica. Strong, passionate, possessive, and liberated, Bell was eager to break with the social conventions yet also deeply involved with home life and her three children, Quentin, Julian, and Angelica. It was Bell who was at the center of Bloomsbury life, not only keeping the houses where its members often gathered but also maintaining the relationships among husbands, lovers, and friends. With a foreword by Quentin Bell and an afterword by Bell's biographer Frances Spalding, these often bawdy, gossipy, and amusing letters to Lytton Strachey, Maynard Keynes, and Lady Ottoline Morrell, among many others, provide a stark, revealing portrait of Vanessa Bell and a fresh look at Bloomsbury and its times. | 
