We’ve already been to the Tamar Valley and the depths of Derbyshire, and today I welcome you to my beautiful adopted home of Oxford, in particular, the area called Jericho.

That’s St Barnabas, one of Jericho’s most famous landmarks, and best known for its role in Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy. In fact, you can just see the back of my house in this picture. Do pull up a cushion and let’s get comfortable because I know that there is a lot to chew over when it come to Vanessa and Virginia by Susan Sellers.

Now, before I go on, I feel compelled to remind you all that if you haven’t already read the novel, there will be spoilers ahead.

The thing that made me choose this book in the first place was my love of Virginia Woolf’s novels, and my fascination with the relationship between two very artistic sisters growing up in an less than typical way. What I genuinely wasn’t expecting, though, was for this novel to be narrated by Vanessa, rather than Virginia. I think I can be forgiven for believing the initial pages were in the voice of Virginia. For instance, the very opening paragraph seemed to suggest my very favourite Woolf novel:

I am watching the clouds, tracing giants, castles, fabulous winged beasts as they chase each other across the sky.

I immediately thought of all of Bond Street looking up to watch a sky-writer, not to mention Woolfian flights of fancy with what seems obvious in fact being cast as something esoteric and much more personal and revealing than perhaps seems immediately apparent. But, of course, we quickly learn that the girl seeing fantastical shapes in the sky is Vanessa, rather than Virginia, and thus our expectations are immediately subverted.

The structure of the novel is similarly Woolfian. No detailed linear narrative for us. What we read might be in chronological order but there are gaping holes in the time frame that leap over not just days but whole months and years. No extraneous details here: everything we are told seems to be relevant to Vanessa’s life and thoughts and, importantly, her art. For she is a painter, every bit as artistic and her famous novelist sister. She is seemingly more atune to colours and images as a young child, whileVirginia is painted (so to speak) as an echo of her father (the literary critic Leslie Stephen), accompanying him to the library, searching out obscure facts. And here appears to be the first diversion away from what is received wisdom, perhaps, about the more famous sister. Virginia was artistic, imaginative, and set apart from other people because of her art. Here, though, we read Vanessa as the daydreamer, while Virginia is the one who encourages their younger brothers to climb precarious walls.

Quite aside from Vanessa and Virginias’ roles as Bloomsbury Group artistes, though, is the narrative of the two girls/women as sisters. Now, I grew up fundamentally as an only child (my siblings having all left home by the time I was born) so I cannot fully relate to the sisterly relationship, but it seems to me that every possible attribute of such a relationship was writ large here: love, passion, jealousy, competition, anger, but above all a connection that no one, not Virginia’s beloved Leonard, not any of Vanessa’s lovers, not the ‘magnificent’ Vita Sackville-West, could come close to compromising. And here the episodic structure of the novel really came into its own for me, with arguments described but at the same time glossed over as “you” appeared again with no explanation as to how ill tempers were assuaged on either side.

What struck me most of all, though, is that for all the novel’s declaring itself to be the story of two sisters and the relationship between them, this is, at heart, the story of the lesser know sister Vanessa Bell. However, the novel is narrated in the first person, with Vanessa referring to Virginia as “you”. So, then, I assumed that the reader was meant to identify itself with Virginia in terms of what we were reading. It seemed to me that she was writing to Virginia for the first “real” time, coming clean about feelings, motivations, and secrets that she might not otherwise had done. Of course, Virginia has already committed suicide by the time that our novel is “written”, so in the end I was reading it as a letter, a confession almost, about what had been and, more importantly, could have been.

I feel I have gone on too long now, and I want to open it up to the floor, as it were, but before I do, I just wanted to ask this. Now, I’m reasonably familiar with Virginia Woolf’s life and works, so there were a number of references throughout that I picked up on where someone who was coming to this novel without any preconceived notions wouldn’t have noticed anything. Similarly there were events and aspects of the Vanessa/Virginia relationship that I was intrigued to hear about from Vanessa’s point of view, in particular the fact that she contributed the front covers to most (all?) of her sister’s novels. This seemed to me to be a key factor in the artistic and familial relationships of the two women, but it wasn’t really looked at in this novel. But, for those of you who aren’t familiar with biographical detail, how did you find this novel? Did you feel you were missing something, or did you think it read perfectly well as a story of the relationship between two sisters, regardless of their providence?

I can’t wait to find out what you all thought of Vanessa and Virginia, and I’ll be back online around 10am UK time to join the discussion.

]]> http://blog.otherstories.co.uk/2010/03/vanessa-and-virginia/feed/ 63 http://blog.otherstories.co.uk/2010/03/not-the-tv-book-group-a-reminder/ http://blog.otherstories.co.uk/2010/03/not-the-tv-book-group-a-reminder/#comments Fri, 05 Mar 2010 14:43:58 +0000 Kirsty http://blog.otherstories.co.uk/?p=1004

Just a quick post to remind you all to join me here at Other Stories this Sunday for the third meeting of the Not the TV Book Group. I’m already preparing myself to make hundreds of virtual cups of tea, and I really must get on with baking those cup cakes. Do join us, and I really do hope you enjoy the novel. Whatever happens, I’m looking forward to a great discussion.