A Very Close Conspiracy: Vanessa Bell and Virginia Woolf

This volume recounts the story of a deep and close relationship between two sisters -- English writer Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) and English painter and interior designer Vanessa Bell (1879-1961). The author explores the influence they exerted over each other's lives, their competitiveness, the fierce love they had for each other and also their intense rivalry. The thoughts, motives and actions of these two remarkably artistic women who jointly created the Bloomsbury Group is revealed with all its intricacies. The two sisters' childhood was blighted by tragedy and trauma and their early lives were subject to the frustrations that were common to the women of Victorian and Edwardian England. The author argues that their subsequent successes as writer and artist owed much to this mutual enrichment.