Full Description
"Freeman's fascinating tale is first and foremost a portrait of Jewish life in late Victorian England" - Michael Arditti, "Independent on His Mistress's Voice". In her latest novel, Gillian Freeman transposes the Bloomsbury Group from the stifling pages of history into the fabric of a narrative that gives them a face more human than it is usually presented. The large cast of characters revolves around the beautiful Stephen sisters who, once married, become painter Vanessa Bell and novelist Virginia Woolf. From the opening in the suffocating atmosphere of their family home at 22 Hyde Park Gate to the unbearable sad conclusion at Monk's House in rural Sussex, Gillian Freeman follows the lives and careers of the two women, their husbands, lovers and friends, most of whom were to have a profound effect on art and literature during the first half of the twentieth century. This highly unconventional group that included Lytton Strachey, Vita Sackville-West, Bertrand Russell and Lady Ottoline Morrell, has been vividly re-imagined as characters who could have stepped from a glorious soap opera encompassing the first forty years of the last century and they become both more approachable and more sympathetic.
