Vanessa and Virginia

In a gloomy house in Hyde Park Gate, two young girls are raised to be perfect ladies. But from the beginning Vanessa Bell and her sister Virginia Woolf pursue different dreams, and in their Bloomsbury household they create a ferment of free thinking and even freer living. Devoted to each other, yet fiercely competitive, both sisters fight to realise their artistic vision amidst a chaos of desire, scandal, illness and war.

Traced with lyrical intensity, their intertwined lives gradually reveal an underlying pattern. Only at the end of this fascinating work does the real nature of the relationship between Virginia and Vanessa become clear. Susan Sellers’ novel reveals a dramatic new interpretation of one of the most famous and iconic events in twentieth-century literature – Woolf’s suicide by drowning – as the two sisters’ life-long rivalry reaches its final crisis.

An expert on Woolf’s life and work, Susan Sellers is inspired by Woolf’s own brilliant narrative technique – a sensuous, impressionistic, interior voice – to inhabit the mind of an artist at work, and recreate the tale of the two sisters as Vanessa might have told it. Vanessa and Virginia is a chronicle of love and revenge, madness, genius, and the compulsion to create beauty in the face of relentless difficulty and deep grief.

Praise for Vanessa and Virginia:

‘A beautiful, haunting novel about the love, the rivalry between two gifted sisters, and the real purpose of Art. The achievement here is an uncanny, utterly persuasive empathy for both sisters, and the world and times in which they lived.’ John Burnside

‘Deftly, apparently effortlessly, Susan Sellers’s novel of love, art, and sexual jealousy gives us convincing and intimate access to the relationship between two remarkable sisters. At once pellucid and sophisticated, Vanessa and Virginia is quite simply a pleasure to read.’ Robert Crawford

For a review on the Vulpes Libris blog, please click the following link:

http://vulpeslibris.wordpress.com/2008/06/14/vanessa-and-virginia-by-susan-sellers/

About Susan Sellers

After a nomadic childhood, Susan Sellers ran away to Paris. She worked as a barmaid, tour guide and nanny, bluffed her way as a software translator and co-wrote a film script with a Hollywood screen writer. Closely involved with leading French feminist writers such as Helene Cixous, she was among the first to introduce their work to the English-speaking world. From Paris she travelled to Swaziland, teaching English to tribal grandmothers, and to Peru, where she worked for a women’s aid agency. She moved to Scotland and in 2002 won the Canongate Prize for New Writing. She now lives mostly near Cambridge with her husband, a composer, and a young son, but is a part-time professor in English literature at St Andrews University. She has published short stories and a number of books and translations; this is her first novel.

An interview with Susan Sellers

When did you first begin writing, and what inspired you to do so? Have any specific books/authors served as inspiration for you?

I wrote stories as a child in a code I invented so that no one in my family could read them. They were fantasies about wishes coming true but the secret pleasure of writing stayed with me. In my late teens I turned to poetry and even (briefly) tried drama. I wrote a first novel in my twenties but couldn’t decide how it should end. French feminist writers such as Hélène Cixous have had a great influence on me precisely because their work questions all the rules.

Can you tell us something about the inspiration behind Vanessa and Virginia in particular? And about what you were trying to achieve; what ideas you were trying to convey?

I have always thought Freud was wrong and that what shapes us as individuals is as much our siblings as our parents. In 2001 I had a period of leave funded by The Leverhulme Trust from St Andrews University where I work as a Professor of English Literature. I started a short story about two sisters and the intense love and rivalry that existed between them. I was reading a great deal of Virginia Woolf at the time and this led me to Frances Spalding’s extraordinary biography of Virginia’s sister, the painter Vanessa Bell. The details of the sisters’ relationship fascinated me and I quickly found their lives and voices taking over my story.

Although the novel explores the complicated bond between Vanessa and Virginia, other strands came into focus as I wrote. For instance, I became captivated by Vanessa’s paintings – I had reproductions of as many of them as I could acquire pinned up round my desk – and in the end I think the book is as much about the making of a work of art as it is about siblings. I was also puzzled by Vanessa. She was the more beautiful sister and had many admirers (including Virginia’s husband Leonard!), and yet the man she devoted herself to was a lifelong homosexual. What makes a woman fall in love with someone she knows can never fully love her in return? Then again, the whole backdrop of Bloomsbury is such a gift for a writer. I had great fun with some of the more flamboyant characters like the writer Lytton Strachey, or the society hostess Lady Ottoline Morrell.

How do you go about creating your voice on the page?

The first thing that happens is a glimmering in my head – it’s often a character, though sometimes it can be an image or even the kernel of a story. Whatever it is it has to become real – vivid and alive in my imagination – before I can write it down. I make odd notes at this stage, though nothing is coherent or put into any order. I always find it difficult to begin, and go through a good deal of displacement activity. When I finally get going I write the first draft as quickly as I can, without rereading it. I make further notes as I work because it’s only as I write that I get a clear sense of what’s happening: who all the characters are, what their story is about. Once the first draft is finished I reread it, trying to find things I like in it and not just focussing on all that is wrong.

Then the hard work starts. My first draft might only take me a few months, but what comes next – rewriting and more rewriting – can take forever. I love that moment when you feel as if a sentence or paragraph has finally fallen into place. Usually I can go on tinkering indefinitely!

How and when do you write?

In an ideal world, I begin in the morning and write until I cannot write any more. In reality – I have a busy professional life, a house to run, a young child – it is rarely like that. Mostly it feels as if writing is a theft – time stolen from all the many pressing commitments life holds.

The period of leave when I drafted Vanessa and Virginia remains an idyllic time for me because I had no work commitments and we lived in a Cambridge college. Virginia Woolf was right to focus on the material conditions that produce writing in her famous essay A Room of One’s Own. Thanks to the generosity of the Warden and Staff of Robinson College, for a whole year I had no meals to prepare or housework to do. Instead I would get up every morning and write. Bliss!

What do you enjoy reading? What are you reading that you can recommend at the moment?

I’m am eclectic reader, though what draws me is good writing. If I’m in a library or bookshop the first thing I’ll do is open a book and read a few sample sentences to see how they sound - rather as I might squeeze fruit to see if it’s ripe or feel fabric to gauge its quality. If the words are right – if they are evocative, or compelling, or transport me in some way – I’ll read on. If I sense the writing is simply a means to an end then I’m unlikely to continue. I’m suspicious of genre fiction for this reason. Even if a book has an interesting character or story at its core, I won’t read if I don’t like the writing.

I grew up on the English ‘classics’ – Jane Austen, the Brontës, Katherine Mansfield, Jean Rhys, Virginia Woolf – which I still read. I did my A levels in Brussels and this led to the discovery of European writers such as Gustave Flaubert, Albert Camus, Hermann Hesse, Thomas Mann. The publication of forgotten or out-of-print women’s writing in the late 1980s and 1990s had a great impact on me, and I still tend to prioritise books by women. I think I’ve read everything by Margaret Atwood, A.S. Byatt, Angela Carter, Helen Dunmore, Marguerite Duras, Jeanne Hyvrard, Rose Tremain, Christa Wolf. I’ve just finished Jackie Kay’s witty, poignant Wish I Was Here. I’m currently reading Learning to Talk by Hilary Mantel – wonderful!

An extract from Vanessa and Virginia

I knew it was right the moment I saw it. Symmetrical and comely, with its sloping roof and large windows, it was a child’s drawing of a house. I was overjoyed when you asked me to rent it with you. As the agent showed us through the rooms a sudden memory of our childhood holidays in St Ives flashed through my mind.

In the country, I reasoned, I would be free. With Clive safely ensconced in London, and Roger visiting only at weekends, I could live once again at my own rhythm. The children would have a garden to play in, and I could return to my work. The fact that we would have a house independently of our husbands seemed to herald a new era.

In Asheham, my days gradually settled into the pattern that suited me. In the mornings I painted, then we gathered for lunch, and in the afternoons I gardened while the boys played hide-and-seek amongst the apple trees or rooted in the flower-beds for treasure. There were frequent visitors. I loved the sense of purposeful absorption that emanated through the house as its occupants settled to some pursuit.

It was at Asheham that I first experimented with art outside a frame. It was here I began to see that painting might be part of life. I discovered the pleasures of transforming the objects I lived with. I copied the frescoes of Fra Angelico onto the peeling plasterwork in my bedroom, created a jungle of colour for the boys. I decorated walls and doors, furniture and ornaments, with figures, flowers, abstract patterns. My work broadened as a consequence.

*****

I stare at your letter, then fold it in two and put it back in my pocket. I rest my elbows on the window sill and look out over the garden. Something about your tone rings false. Julian’s head emerges for a moment from behind one of the currant bushes and I wave at him. He grins at me before disappearing back out of sight. I do not understand why you have cancelled your visit. I have planned a surprise birthday party for you, and now all my preparations are in vain. I let your phrases beat round my head, trying to catch their hidden message. It is all Leonard: his article for the Nation, his rally for the Russians, his government committee. Whichever way I turn your words their meaning is the same. Leonard takes precedence over me.

*****

Sometimes love comes instantly, with blinding certainty, sometimes it is a sea mist, slowly enveloping the view until one is hard-pressed to remember the features of the shore.

When did I stop seeing Duncan as my brother’s lover and begin to fall in love with him myself? I think it was that very first weekend, when Adrian brought him to Asheham, and I watched him painting in the garden. I had never known Adrian with a lover before and the sight was strangely unnerving. I felt a sharp stab of jealousy as I glimpsed the two of them kissing from my studio window.

The next morning I set my own easel alongside Duncan’s on the grass. I studied him as I mixed my colours. There was an intensity about his concentration that communicated itself. I seemed to see more clearly as I looked past him towards my chosen subject. As I began to paint, our movements fell into the same pattern. There was no rivalry, only the shared sense of a common pursuit. Not since those far-off days with Thoby in the nursery had I felt so at one with another human being. I could not help falling in love.