Reading Priya Parmar’s splendid Vanessa and her Sister
46 Gordon Square, the house where Virginia Stephen (later Woolf) lived with her siblings after the death of their parents, comes to life in Priya Parmar’s book in exquisite, often surprising detail. Writing a historical novel is never easy but when one of the main characters in your book is Virginia Woolf, one of the greatest writers of the 20th century, the author’s job is harder still. However, it isn’t Virginia, but her more timorous yet equally talented sister Vanessa, who is at the centre of Parmar’s book. Organised as journal entries by Vanessa Stephen, the book takes us through eight years in the life of the Stephens of Gordon Square.
Parmar sets her novel at a time when Virginia is still contemplating writing her first novel and all she has published as yet are literary pieces like the one alluded to at the beginning of the book, a review of the Golden Bowl in the Manchester Guardian. From time to time in the novel, Virginia shows glimpses of the literary greatness that lies in wait for her. Yet, for most of the time, she is an undecided, fickle, even diffident figure. And of course, she has not yet met Leonard Woolf.
The novel revolves for a large part around the literary soirees which were regularly held at No. 46 attended by the Cambridge friends of Virginia and Vanessa’s brother, Thoby Stephens. These are sparkling if somewhat cynical gatherings, at the centre of which lounged the almost frighteningly clever and flamboyant writer Lytton Strachey. Also present is the quiet and even-tempered literary giant, Morgan Forster. At the first of the soirees in the book, Forster declares that he has completed his first novel and awaits its publication. Virginia sits in churlish silence with occasional flashes of erudition that remind one of her powerful treatises on women’s education and right to work---Three Guineas and A Room of One’s Own. There are other bits in the book which will make any fan rush to pull out her favourite Woolf title off the shelf. Like when the family goes to Cornwall on vacation, and they walk daily to the Godrevy Lighthouse.
But ultimately this is Vanessa’s story, the artistic, compassionate, classically beautiful sister of Virginia who became de facto care provider to the household once her parents and half-sister died, even as Thoby became the head of the family. Virginia’s nervous condition which often took a turn for the worse also became Vanessa’s problem, something that confounded and distressed her often, and caused her to tread carefully, perhaps too carefully, around the whimsical, jealous and self-indulgent Virginia.
These years at Gordon Square also tell the story of Vanessa’s growing fondness for Clive Bell, another of Thoby’s Cambridge set, who claims to love her to distraction. Vanessa holds out first even though she is drawn to the calm, equanimous lecturer, giving in finally after Thoby’s sudden death.
But what makes the sisters who have been held together through childhood, adolescence and early adulthood by life, intellect, death and insanity drift away from each other is the real googly in the book. Parmar delves into the relationship between the sisters unhurriedly, at times almost discomfitingly so for the reader. Virginia’s possessiveness towards Vanessa and her deep resentment for Bell chafes at the edges of a fragile, young relationship between the newlyweds, and soon takes the form of a betrayal which drives perhaps a lifelong wedge between the sisters. As she revels in childbirth, and drifts away first from Virginia and later her husband, Vanessa finds herself at last in her art.
Parmar intersperses the sometimes claustrophobic narrative about the sisters with detailed letters that Strachey writes about the Stephens, and particularly Virginia, to his dear friend posted in India, Leonard Woolf, another of Thoby’s friends from Cambridge. The letters form a tantalising prequel to everything fans know of Leonard and Virginia’s relationship and marriage. This astonishingly engaging book cleverly weaves what we know of these literary and artistic giants with a fictional albeit entirely plausible narrative. Unintimidated by the volumes of literature and biographies of almost all her protagonists, and particularly Virginia, Parmar writes as if she had once sat on the sofas at 46 Gordon Square.
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