- Door to the Berg Collection
After four hours of reading mostly unpublished letters from Vanessa Bell to her sister Virginia Woolf today, I felt sad.
The letters — and there are 371 of them dating from 1910 to 1940 in the New York Public Library’s Berg Collection — are full of details about living arrangements, house guests, child rearing, artistic endeavors and personality conflicts.
But the thing that stuck out to me today — which is well off my research topic of the Bloomsbury pacifists — was how much Vanessa had to juggle. And that made me sad.
The letters written during the World War I years, which was also the period of time in which she had young children at home, had the biggest impact on me. In them, I saw how much she did to keep so many balls in the air at once.
Vanessa kept the household running smoothly, doing her best to economize on household expenses such as coal and foodstuffs and to work around such challenges as war rationing and exiting servants. She kept the men in her life, Clive Bell and Duncan Grant and David “Bunny” Garnett, happy and productive, and she helped Grant and Garnett obtain conscientious objector status. She raised three children, instructing at least two of them in French and music, along with the similarly aged children of friends.
To me, several of the most poignant letters were written shortly before Christmas 1918, after the Armistice but before Vanessa gave birth to her third child and only daughter, Angelica. Those letters, obviously written hastily, with last-minute thoughts scribbled up the margin and across the top of the page, were full of instructions to Virginia about the children.
Virginia had generously agreed to care for Vanessa’s two eldest, Julian and Quentin, when she gave birth to her third child. And Vanessa was frantic to convey her gratitude, as well as her advice — about using nightlights and administering bromide and promising to ship additional clean clothing for the boys after their arrival.
While writing the last of the letters, on Christmas Eve, Vanessa went into labor. Angelica was born on Christmas Day.
Even then, there was no real rest for Vanessa. For she had guests. Garnett was at Charleston Farmhouse on the day of the birth, and Maynard Keynes was a houseguest as well.
More amazing than all this is that on top of the busy life as a wife and mother that Vanessa led, she produced art, wonderful art. How did she find the time and energy for it all?
All I can say is, she was a woman. And that is what women do. Isn’t it?
Read more about my time at the Berg for my NYPL Short-Term Research Fellowship:
- Day 1 at the Berg: Reunion with the lions, February 7, 2012
- Day 2 at the Berg: Tips from a librarian, February 8, 2012
- Day 3 at the Berg: Leads from the curator, February 9, 2012
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[…] bit that popped out at me the most, though, was the contrast between Vanessa’s letters to her sister Virginia written shortly before the birth of her daughter Angelica on Christmas Day 1918 and those written […]
[…] Comments « Day 4 at the Berg: Maternal concerns of Vanessa […]
The picture, often set forth, of Vanessa as the joyous carefree spirit, certainly doesn’t tell her story, Her burden was heavy & her life often sad. But Vanessa, like most upper-middle-class, even middle-class, women of her time, had a cook & household help. I believe Vanessa’s heaviest load was her emotional stress & unhappiness – the men she devoted her efforts to had other priorities, and hers was what I would consider a pretty thankless job, although it was her choice. What’s sad to me is that so many women are still doing it all — without help — caring for home & family, supporting menfolk (though usually just one at a time), & pursuing their own careers as well.
Thank you for telling us!
I came to think of Linda Nochlin’s essay: “why have there not been any great women artsts” (1971). In this text she shows us how women, historically, has been kept out of universities and thereby not have had the chance to develop in the same way as their male companions. But the story of VB shows us that we also have to consider the everyday workload of most women. To do what VB did one really have/had to be a super-woman.