The Book Club discussion

Use this for comments and reviews of the June book selection, along with other relevant news and comments.

A couple of questions and answers from the author:

What year/s would this be set in around about?

Priya Parmar: ...the story spans from 1905-1912.

"When I was in London this summer for the exhibition of Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury group, a new reprinted book was presented: Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell, a very close conspiracy by Jane Dunn. Why write another book about the two sisters? I am curious what it adds to the previous one. Cécile Verburg, Leiden, The Netherlands"

Priya Parmar: A Very Close Conspiracy is a marvellous book but it is non fiction and mine is a novel. We both used the same archival source material. Wasn't the exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery marvellous? So good.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2...

Personally, I would recommend viewing the movie Orlando in conjunction with reading our book selection for June. Orlando (the book) is in a sense Virginia Woolf's tale of the life of her sister, created by giving her multiple personages and genders across several hundred years. To some extent, it is a parody of her father's work as an official biographer. It was apparently written as sort of an in-circle riff.

Some links for:



A Very Close Conspiracy: Vanessa Bell and Virginia Woolf by Jane Dunn

I have attended a memoir writing seminar by the author of this study on Virginia Woolf:



Virginia Woolf: The Impact of Childhood Sexual Abuse on Her Life and Work by Louise DeSalvo

When I first starting discussing books online, I "met" this author who had recently completed:

A Life of One's Own: A Guide to Better Living Through the Work and Wisdom of Virginia Woolf by Ilana Simons

This biography of Virginia Woolf has received high praise:

Virginia Woolf by Hermione Lee

New York Times Review, January, 2015:

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/11/boo...

"The lives of Vanessa and Virginia have been amply considered before now, not only by Woolf in her fiction and other Bloomsburyites in their correspondence, biographies and essays (and later by Vanessa’s son Quentin Bell and Virginia’s husband, Leonard Woolf), but by contemporary writers, from Michael Holroyd and Hermione Lee to Michael Cunningham and Katie Roiphe. Because she expressed herself through literature, not painting, Virginia’s history and internal life have been easier to access than Vanessa’s. Still, the members of the Bloomsbury group were compulsive letter writers, so the facts of Vanessa’s complicated life have long been available, even if her private thoughts are harder to surmise, since, unlike Virginia, she didn’t keep a diary. After immersing herself in the thousands of letters exchanged by Vanessa’s social circle, Parmar proceeded to invent a diary for Vanessa, along with a series of letters, postcards and telegrams that bring dimension and vitality to her headstrong entourage."

The Guardian review, February, 2015:

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015...

"This hardly detracts from the fact that Vanessa and Her Sister is a remarkable achievement, all the more so for being only Parmar’s second novel. She has had the blessing of Vanessa Bell’s granddaughter and daughter-in-law, and her research has clearly been meticulous. But it’s the central portrait of Vanessa’s emotional life and her journey to a more disillusioned, if pragmatic, self-knowledge, that makes this novel, with its familiar setting, so fresh and compelling."

Kirkus interview:

"...While Vanessa and Her Sister is inspired by intensive research, and based on real people, it’s fictive at the core.

"'I’m so much more interested in a story when I know it’s got some sort of foothold in the past. In terms of what the role is, I think it’s great if [historical fiction] teaches you something, but it’s primarily meant to bring characters and a time and a period alive in the way that all fiction is. If it sticks to the historical bones, that’s wonderful, too, but it shouldn’t encroach too closely on the sphere of nonfiction,' she says."

https://www.kirkusreviews.com/feature...

Kirkus review:
https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-re...

"Not exactly uncharted territory, but Parmar enters it with passion and precision, delivering a sensitive, superior soap opera of celebrated lives."

The Independent, 2/1/2015, Lucy Scholes

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-ent...

"Parmar certainly isn’t the first to dramatise the entanglements of the Bloomsbury Group, but in situating Vanessa, rather than Virginia – who actually comes across as awkward, conniving and extremely unlikable – at the heart of it, she offers a fresh perspective on a story that’s already become legend."

(This troubles me and restricts my looking forward to the reading. I find myself wanting to defend troubled Virginia. So, will have to exhort myself to open up to the story.)

The Independent, 2/21/2015, Lesley McDowell

"It’s not often that you wish a book wouldn’t end, but Priya Parmar’s second novel about the relationship between the artist Vanessa Bell and her sister, Virginia Woolf, is so deliciously gossipy (while occasionally wonderfully prurient), and almost too beautifully written, to stop at 339 pages. The neediness, the control, the mind games, and ultimately the betrayal at the heart of this often poisonous sibling rivalry, is never less than fascinating."

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-ent...

http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/o...

Story of the death of John Nash.

We read A Beautiful Mind for September, 2002.

A slide show of 142 of Vanessa Bell’s paintings (some with Duncan Grant, apparently):

http://www.bbc.co.uk/arts/yourpaintin...

NPR interview with Priya Parmar:

http://www.npr.org/2014/12/28/3732787...

"On whether there were any parts of the book the family disapproved of

"Virginia Nicholson gave me notes and her biggest note was that her grandmother would have used the word 'napkin' instead of the word 'serviette.' So that was her biggest note all the way through the book."

From a comment on the NPR interview:

"Also please read Frances Spalding's informative and art historically accurate biography of Vanessa Bell. The many discussions of Bell's work, her modernist approach to painting and the aesthetic context she supported and created is more telling than any fictional account."

Vanessa Bell