This book wasn’t a Trafalgar Street Book Club (TSBC) choice, but I read it, in a roundabout way, because of the club. Simon Peters had chosen Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway for our September meeting and as an additional bonus we decided to have our first TSBC outing, spending a Saturday touring both Virginia Woolf’s Monk’s House in Rodmell and her sister, and fellow Bloomsbury matriarch, Vanessa Bell’s house, Charleston. It was on the tour of Charleston that the guide in Vanessa Bell’s bedroom told us the story of Angelica, Bell’s daughter by Duncan Grant, who’d married one of Grant’s ex-lovers, David Garnett, 26 years her senior. Garnett had apparently said at Angelica’s birth, “I think of marrying it. When she is 20, I shall be 46 – will it be scandalous?” The guide also told us that Angelica had written an autobiography. As I was curious about the story, and the Bloomsbury group in general, I thought it would be an excellent addition to my interwar reading list. In mid-September I took a two-day solo holiday to Cambridge to look around the town and visit the Duxford Imperial War Museum. I went by train and read most of the book on the journey there and back, finishing it off during a couple of evenings later in the month.

The book is a wonderful child’s eye view of the Bloomsbury world. She’s rather down on her poor Mum, who obviously had the best intentions. It’s curious how little store upper-class women, like Bell, put on education. She apparently had almost none, and didn’t expect that her daughter needed any either. Her childhood was a carefree bohemian and very privileged frolic in Charleston, London, and the South of France. As a teenager she insisted on going to school and was sent to a very liberal girls’ boarding school, where it seemed she learnt little. Her descriptions of the various characters around Charleston are fascinating; Virginia Woolf, brilliant, fun, affectionate, but slightly mad, and looked after by the rather stern Leonard. Clive Bell rather dull and tolerated, but playing the role of father very straight. Duncan Grant, a rather languid adonis. She was only told that Grant rather than Bell was her father in her early twenties, but by then Grant was rather reluctant to assume the role. Towards the end of the story, we get to the famous marriage. It’s all rather seedy on Garnett’s part, seducing an 18-year-old girl in his mid-forties. It seems she was very much onboard with the idea at the time though. They married in 1942 when she was 24 and had four children together. Various members of the Bloomsbury group warned her against the marriage, including her mother, but she was obviously determined to go through with it.

Garnett says in the book that she wrote it to slay some demons. She says she threw herself into domesticity and motherhood to paper over her unsatisfactory marriage. They eventually separated in 1967. She says that she was helped to realise how unhappy she’d been with the help of Freudian psychoanalysis. Large parts of the book are devoted to complaining about her mother, whom she blames for not giving her boundaries or guidance. It all comes across as a bit of a whinge. It’s hard to feel much sympathy when the childhood she describes is idyllic; certainly compared with most other children in the 20s and 30s. Sure, one can criticise Vanessa Bell’s mothering style, but there’s no actual abuse, just a very liberal approach, little different to most middle class parents today. David Garnett was no doubt a bit of a manipulative perv, but she married him at 24 after they’d been together for six years. She had plenty of opportunity to leave and she actively consented to the marriage as an adult. My skepticism is reinforced by the fact that she’d had Freudian psychoanalysis, which is well-known for causing the very problems that it claims to address. Patients are encouraged to blame their parents for everything and ruminate on insignificant dreams and irritations, blowing them out of all proportion. It seems this had definitely happened to Garnett. Having said all that, it was a light and breezy, and quite fun read. The insight into life at Charleston in its heyday and the various Bloomsbury characters was worth the time.