Women of Bloomsbury: Virginia, Vanessa and Carrington - Softcover

Mary Ann Caws is Distinguished Professor of English, French and Comparative Literature at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.

This essay in "personal criticism" attempts to "understand and evaluate the temperaments" of three women artists associated with Bloomsbury: Virginia Woolf, her sister the painter Vanessa Bell, and the less-well-known painter Dora Carrington. Caws's strongly feminist perspective explores the ways these complex women--two bisexuals, two women living with gay men, two suicides--struggled to define their sense of self. The lives of Woolf, Bell, and Carrington point the author toward such issues as "ambivalence, creation, and pain." Caws analyzes the lives and works (fiction, paintings, diaries, letters) by way of a larger "personal advocacy of freedom and unjudgmental evaluation." The ideal reader of this book is a card-carrying member of the sisterhood who somehow hasn't tired of Bloomsbury. The personal dimension (expressed in the subtitle) is a mixed blessing, but this is a thoughtful, often intriguing study.
- Keith Cushman, Univ. of North Carolina, Greensboro
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.