Virginia Woolf's wry, mischievous masterpiece
The writer Virginia Woolf is a figure of endless fascination. A genius touched by madness, her novels changed our very apprehension of life itself; her diaries and letters, richly spiced with wit, give us a matchless portrait of her time. We have seen her ethereal beauty staring out from photographs by George Beresford and Gisèle Freund, and we know that in 1941, haunted by the horrors of war and fearing another bout of madness, she threw herself into the River Ouse with stones in her pockets.
Now, with the appearance of her last unpublished writings, her teasing collaboration with her nephew Quentin Bell, we see just how mischievous and playful she could be. Her sister Vanessa Bell’s two sons, Julian and Quentin, adored their Aunt Virginia, finding her much less alarming than most adults who encountered her. So when, in 1923, the boys founded a family newspaper, the Charleston Bulletin, Quentin (aged 13) approached his aunt.
‘I knew she was an author,’ he later wrote, ‘and though I didn’t think much of her work – that is to say I had failed to finish Kew Gardens – it seemed stupid to have a real author so close at hand and not ask her to contribute.’
They proved the perfect conspirators, and Woolf did much more than provide the occasional article. From 1923 to 1927, the pair of them collaborated on fully edged booklets of stories and drawings that were issued as Supplements to the Bulletin, written or dictated by Woolf and illustrated with relish by Quentin. They both revelled in this opportunity for irreverence, sending up their family and the eccentricities of their Bloomsbury friends with gleeful delight, and they enjoyed the surreptitious nature of their project: ‘Please consider the summer libel,’ Woolf writes in a letter to Quentin.
What fun they had. The Supplements made only occasional appearances, unlike the daily Bulletin, which was written and ‘printed’ (ie, typed) afresh every morning to be presented at the breakfast table, causing young Quentin, as editor, to rise daily at 5.30am – ‘not the habit of a lazy child!’ as he ruefully recalled.
Quentin and his Aunt Virginia had time to dream up ever more surreal scenarios around the peccadilloes of those nearest and dearest to them. Vanessa, her husband Clive Bell and lover Duncan Grant, each became the semi-heroic subject of a Supplement, their lives embroidered with fantastical detail and invention. Said Vanessa, ‘Not a single word is true, of course, but it made me laugh and the pictures are really lovely.’
Beneath the ribbing, as in every good satire, lies the anchorage of truth, making these Supplements an added droll commentary on the lives of the ‘Eminent Charlestonians’ who formed the heart of the Bloomsbury group. Charleston, the somewhat dilapidated farmhouse in the folds of the Sussex Downs leased by Vanessa Bell in 1916 for her growing family, and imaginatively decorated by her and Duncan Grant, became a haven and summer retreat for their circle.
‘It was disorderly and might be called disreputable, but the atmosphere was congenial,’ recalled Quentin later; their guests were drawn to what writer Frances Partridge described as ‘the strong feeling of life being intensely and purposefully lived, of animated talk, laughter, brilliant colour, youth’.
Vanessa’s benign but abstracted blend of creativity and domesticity set the tone, and her scattiness inspired all sorts of misadventures in the Supplements – an encounter with a camel in London’s Fitzroy Street among them.
Virginia and Quentin have further fun at the expense of Vanessa’s husband Clive, the celebrated critic and aesthete, portrayed here in semibiblical mode as The Messiah Of Bloomsbury, whose birth is depicted as a ‘nativity’ among (stuffed) ox and ass in his family’s Wiltshire manor, and whose eye for the ladies is mocked when ‘the idol of Wilts and of many ladies, too many to name, too illustrious to specify’ goes to the aid of his mistress Mary Hutchinson on her ‘sudden disappearance’ in Rodmell Brooks: ‘Mr Bell is here seen saving what remained: two feet, one hand, three inches of pink drawers, and a copy of the Holy Bible, which Mrs H had stolen from Leonard Woolf, Esquire.’
They wickedly send up his ‘undisputed eminence in the world of art and letters’ and speculate that his baldness is due to the ‘indiscriminate application of fresh snowballs to an insufficiently protected pate’.
Duncan Grant, meanwhile, is portrayed a ectionately as a comic and eccentric figure who, ‘determined to show the cows some of the delights of life, went on board the punt [on Charleston’s pond] and set re to 18 Catherine wheels, which lit up the horizon for many miles and tore several large holes in his trousers.’
Who could not love such a man?
But no one was safe: Emily the maid, who ‘at her best… could destroy 40 pieces of china in one minute’; the painter Roger Fry, who arrived ‘to rebuild the studio with his own hands: 25 tons of concrete; the help of Mr Ruskin’s The Seven Lamps Of Architecture; and his own formidable, gristly, grumpy, grousely ill-temper…’
The economist Maynard Keynes at nearby Tilton was skewered for his parsimony, proving ‘the valuable mathematical fact that two grouse are enough to feed 12, allowing for the birds being cooked on toast’.
While collaborating with Quentin, Virginia Woolf published two of her greatest novels, Mrs Dalloway (1925) and To The Lighthouse (1927). It is fascinating to see how she could meanwhile respond to a favourite nephew with such a delightful cornucopia of nonsense.
The Charleston Bulletin Supplements, edited by Claudia Olk, are published by the British Library, priced £12.99.
Now, with the appearance of her last unpublished writings, her teasing collaboration with her nephew Quentin Bell, we see just how mischievous and playful she could be. Her sister Vanessa Bell’s two sons, Julian and Quentin, adored their Aunt Virginia, finding her much less alarming than most adults who encountered her. So when, in 1923, the boys founded a family newspaper, the Charleston Bulletin, Quentin (aged 13) approached his aunt.
‘I knew she was an author,’ he later wrote, ‘and though I didn’t think much of her work – that is to say I had failed to finish Kew Gardens – it seemed stupid to have a real author so close at hand and not ask her to contribute.’
They proved the perfect conspirators, and Woolf did much more than provide the occasional article. From 1923 to 1927, the pair of them collaborated on fully edged booklets of stories and drawings that were issued as Supplements to the Bulletin, written or dictated by Woolf and illustrated with relish by Quentin. They both revelled in this opportunity for irreverence, sending up their family and the eccentricities of their Bloomsbury friends with gleeful delight, and they enjoyed the surreptitious nature of their project: ‘Please consider the summer libel,’ Woolf writes in a letter to Quentin.
What fun they had. The Supplements made only occasional appearances, unlike the daily Bulletin, which was written and ‘printed’ (ie, typed) afresh every morning to be presented at the breakfast table, causing young Quentin, as editor, to rise daily at 5.30am – ‘not the habit of a lazy child!’ as he ruefully recalled.
Quentin and his Aunt Virginia had time to dream up ever more surreal scenarios around the peccadilloes of those nearest and dearest to them. Vanessa, her husband Clive Bell and lover Duncan Grant, each became the semi-heroic subject of a Supplement, their lives embroidered with fantastical detail and invention. Said Vanessa, ‘Not a single word is true, of course, but it made me laugh and the pictures are really lovely.’
Beneath the ribbing, as in every good satire, lies the anchorage of truth, making these Supplements an added droll commentary on the lives of the ‘Eminent Charlestonians’ who formed the heart of the Bloomsbury group. Charleston, the somewhat dilapidated farmhouse in the folds of the Sussex Downs leased by Vanessa Bell in 1916 for her growing family, and imaginatively decorated by her and Duncan Grant, became a haven and summer retreat for their circle.
‘It was disorderly and might be called disreputable, but the atmosphere was congenial,’ recalled Quentin later; their guests were drawn to what writer Frances Partridge described as ‘the strong feeling of life being intensely and purposefully lived, of animated talk, laughter, brilliant colour, youth’.
Vanessa’s benign but abstracted blend of creativity and domesticity set the tone, and her scattiness inspired all sorts of misadventures in the Supplements – an encounter with a camel in London’s Fitzroy Street among them.
Virginia and Quentin have further fun at the expense of Vanessa’s husband Clive, the celebrated critic and aesthete, portrayed here in semibiblical mode as The Messiah Of Bloomsbury, whose birth is depicted as a ‘nativity’ among (stuffed) ox and ass in his family’s Wiltshire manor, and whose eye for the ladies is mocked when ‘the idol of Wilts and of many ladies, too many to name, too illustrious to specify’ goes to the aid of his mistress Mary Hutchinson on her ‘sudden disappearance’ in Rodmell Brooks: ‘Mr Bell is here seen saving what remained: two feet, one hand, three inches of pink drawers, and a copy of the Holy Bible, which Mrs H had stolen from Leonard Woolf, Esquire.’
They wickedly send up his ‘undisputed eminence in the world of art and letters’ and speculate that his baldness is due to the ‘indiscriminate application of fresh snowballs to an insufficiently protected pate’.
Duncan Grant, meanwhile, is portrayed a ectionately as a comic and eccentric figure who, ‘determined to show the cows some of the delights of life, went on board the punt [on Charleston’s pond] and set re to 18 Catherine wheels, which lit up the horizon for many miles and tore several large holes in his trousers.’
Who could not love such a man?
But no one was safe: Emily the maid, who ‘at her best… could destroy 40 pieces of china in one minute’; the painter Roger Fry, who arrived ‘to rebuild the studio with his own hands: 25 tons of concrete; the help of Mr Ruskin’s The Seven Lamps Of Architecture; and his own formidable, gristly, grumpy, grousely ill-temper…’
The economist Maynard Keynes at nearby Tilton was skewered for his parsimony, proving ‘the valuable mathematical fact that two grouse are enough to feed 12, allowing for the birds being cooked on toast’.
While collaborating with Quentin, Virginia Woolf published two of her greatest novels, Mrs Dalloway (1925) and To The Lighthouse (1927). It is fascinating to see how she could meanwhile respond to a favourite nephew with such a delightful cornucopia of nonsense.
The Charleston Bulletin Supplements, edited by Claudia Olk, are published by the British Library, priced £12.99.