On why she chose to put Bell at the center of her novel They wrote letters the way we write email, basically. They left behind huge amounts of correspondence. But I did use all of the primary material I could find to get an idea of, you know, their lives and their voices and their writing styles and just who they were. Vanessa Bell did not keep a diary, so this is entirely fictional. On how much she relied on the letters and journals Bell, Woolf and their friends and family left behind

I didn't realize quite how entangled they were until I got into it. She was so modern and so interesting and it was sort of her that I was interested in. How?Īnd so their romantic lives were a huge draw for me, but she was really the thing that pulled me in. Your purchase helps support NPR programming. Parmar tells NPR's Linda Wertheimer that she chose to put Bell at the center of her novel because, compared to her sister, her voice has been largely unheard.Ĭlose overlay Buy Featured Book Title Vanessa and Her Sister Author Priya Parmar It's called Vanessa and Her Sister and it's written in the form of Bell's journal. Priya Parmar has written a novel about the group, and especially about the Stephen women.

Today, the women are better remembered than their brothers: They were the painter Vanessa Bell and the writer Virginia Woolf. In the beginning, their clubhouse was the home of the Stephen siblings - two brothers and two sisters. Eventually, they came to be known as the Bloomsbury Group. The friends – writers like Lytton Strachey, artists like Roger Fry and thinkers like economist John Maynard Keynes - continued to meet almost weekly for many years. In the winter of 1905, in the London neighborhood of Bloomsbury, a group of friends began meeting for drinks and conversation that lasted late into the night. 'Her voice is largely unheard and I was really interested in that,' Priya Parmar says. Unlike her sister, Vanessa Bell, seen here circa 1910, didn't keep a journal.

Vanessa and Her Sister by Priya Parmar