Frances Spalding’s now reissued study was first published in 1983. The fact that no other biography of this pivotal figure in the Bloomsbury group has appeared since shows how hard it would be to better Spalding’s work. It offers a fascinating insight into the life and times of the group and their quest to escape from the emotionally and aesthetically restricted lives of their parents’ generation. Vanessa’s gift for organisation meant she became the head of the household after her mother’s death. Her sister, Virginia Woolf, nicknamed her “the Saint” for her practicality and sense of duty but, as Spalding shows, she later became a mother figure for the whole Bloomsbury group. A complex woman who walked an emotional tightrope in her private life, keeping her husband (Clive Bell), ex-lover (Roger Fry) and lover (Duncan Grant) all within her orbit, she could be “formidable and reserved” with people she disliked, outrageously bawdy among friends and possessive towards her children, but she was always ruthlessly honest, sensual and fiercely independent. A luminous biography of a remarkable person and artist.
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