Vanessa Bell: Portrait of the Bloomsbury Artist

Vanessa Bell is central to the history of the Bloomsbury Group, yet until this authorised biography was written, she largely remained a silent and inscrutable figure. Tantalising glimpses of her life appeared mainly in her sister, Virginia Woolf's, letters, diaries and biography. Frances Spalding here draws upon a mass of unpublished documents to reveal Bell's extraordinary achievements in both her art and her life. She recounts in vivid detail how Bell's move into the Bloomsbury Group and her exposure to Paris and the radical art of the Post-Impressionists ran parrallel with an increasingly unorthodox personal life that spun in convoluted threads between her marriage to Clive Bell, her affair with Roger Fry, her friendship with Duncan Grant and relationship with her sister.

Frances Spalding is an art historian, critic and biographer, and a leading authority of Bloomsbury. She wrote an introduction to the subject, The Bloomsbury Group, for the National Portrait Gallery's 'Companion' series, and has written biographies of Roger Fry, Duncan Grant, Gwen Raverat and of the poet Stevie Smith, as well as Vanessa Bell. For ten years she edited the Charleston Magazine. Her recent books include John Piper, Myfanwy Piper: Lives in Art and Prunella Clough: Regions Unmapped. She is an Honorary Fellow of the Royal College of Art, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and Professor of Art History at Newcastle University, and was awarded a CBE in 2005.