The selected letters of Vanessa Bell Book

This was such a lovely collection of Vanessa Bell's memoirs and I enjoyed every minute I spent with it. Her memoirs make for very pleasant reading and she hits a few universal truths right on the head, and while I think many people would enjoy this collection, I think it will be particularly fascinating to those who are already familiar with Vanessa and her circle of friends.

This collection contains an introduction to Vanessa the woman by her daughter Angelica and a prologue by Lia Giachero who talks about Vanessa as an artist, besides a list of the members of the Memoir Club, a lecture Vanessa gave at Leighton Park School in 1925 and of course the memoirs themselves (Memoirs Relating to Mrs Jackson, Notes on Virginia's Childhood, Life at Hyde Park Gate after 1897, My Sister-in-Law, Notes on Bloomsbury, and Memories of Roger Fry). The last memoir, Memories of Roger Fry, opens like this:

"There is always a certain fascination in recalling the first time one saw anyone who later became one's friend and it is strange how frequently it is possible to do so, though probably at the time one was unaware of anything but the casual meeting with a stranger"

and isn't she just right about that. Simply stated and simply true.

All of her memoirs are very short and the entire collection could be read in a single day. There is a nice simplicity and honesty about her writing, and it is easy to picture to yourself the warm, caring, unpretending, sensible woman who wrote these memoirs. But I have to highlight her lecture at Leighton Park School because it is not only funny, it is fascinating and very, very interesting. The subject is artists, and how painters and writers perceive the world differently. She talks about Virginia's Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown in which an old woman sits in a train carriage. The writer in front of her - Virginia or possibly HG Wells - notices the way the woman's dress is buttoned, her shawls and bonnets, her grey hair and starts picturing to herself where the woman is from, whether her husband left her or she is widowed, where her son is, etc. The writer notices things to try and pin down the woman and find out where she lives, what is her story, her social class, etc. The painter doesn't care whether the old woman wears a hat or a bonnet because she doesn't care about the social implications of either. But she notices whether the rose on the bonnet or hat is pink or red. "The grey hair, which has spoken of old age at once to writers and doctors, means to a painter not just grey hair, but a certain grey - perhaps a grey with silver lights and warm shadows, perhaps an opaque cold grey, but a grey as different from other greys as one chord in music is different from others"

Vanessa, and the painter, sees the world in shapes and colours. To her, WWI was summed up in the word: Khaki. To writers, she says, red in strawberries means ripeness and a blue sky means a fine day, but to Vanessa red is not just red and the sky isn't just blue. To her the world is made of colours, nuances, shapes, light and shadow. Children are fascinated by colours, too, she says, but most people lose their sense of colour and shape as they grow older. ("it was merely tiresome to have to learn that all is not gold that glitters and that that beautiful green paint you got all over your pinafore which made such a wonderful pattern was really dirt and probably poisonous.") The painter, or the madman as she calls herself, keeps the childish fascination with colours and shapes. I loved this lecture and could read it again and again because she opened up a new way of looking at the world to me, and she might do the same to you, too.