Nicholson, Virginia

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NICHOLSON, Virginia

PERSONAL:

Born in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, England; daughter of Quentin Bell (an artist and author) and Anne Olivier (Popham) Bell (an editor); married; three children. Education: Attended Cambridge University.

ADDRESSES:

Home—Sussex, England. Agent—c/o Caroline Dawnay, Drury House, 34-43 Russell Street, London WC2B 5HA, England.

CAREER:

Author. Also worked for BBC Television as a documentary researcher.

WRITINGS:

(With father, Quentin Bell) Charleston: A Bloomsbury House and Garden, Frances Lincoln (London, England), 1997.

Among the Bohemians: Experiments in Living, 1900-1939, William Morrow (New York, NY), 2002.

WORK IN PROGRESS:

A Singular Generation, a book about the women who lost their men in World War I, for Penguin (London).

SIDELIGHTS:

British author Virginia Nicholson comes from a family that has been linked to the arts for generations. Her grandmother, Vanessa Bell, was a painter; her great aunt, Virginia Woolf, was a famous novelist; and her father, Quentin Bell, was both a painter and a writer. In 1997, Nicholson collaborated with her father on the writing of Charleston: A Bloomsbury House and Garden. The book tells the story of Charleston Farmhouse, home to Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant and gathering place for the legendary Bloomsbury group. The Bloomsbury group was a cluster of rather unconventional London-based writers and artists active during the first two decades of the twentieth century.

Both Quentin Bell and Nicholson spent time at Charleston in their youth, and Bell drew upon his memories to begin the book's construction. He had completed a first draft of the book by the age of eighty-five but fell ill and asked for Nicholson's help in finishing it up. After his death in 1996, she conducted extensive research to set her father's memories in their proper context. Charleston serves as both a conveyor of the Bloomsbury decorative style and a memoir of sorts. The text is set off by Alen MacWeeney's photographs and pictures from Vanessa Bell's family album. Art Book contributor Ann Geneva described the work as "a handsomely produced volume written with a rare combination of sound research and deep feeling."

Nicholson continued her study of the lives of the artistic community in early twentieth-century England with her 2002 book Among the Bohemians: Experiments in Living, 1900-1939. The book explores not only the group's experimental styles of art but also their challenge of the domestic conventions of everyday life. Nicholson divided the work into chapters relating to different themes—interior decoration, child-rearing, sexual freedom, clothing, and cuisine. She drew from a wide range of sources, including novels, letters, memoirs, and sociological data, for her research. The factual information in the books is interspersed with stories and accounts involving well-known artists of the time—among them poet Dylan Thomas, painter Augustus John, writer Ford Madox Ford, and novelist Virginia Woolf—alongside a vast range of lesser-known figures from the Bohemian subculture. The book also provides an appendix giving brief biographical details of nearly 150 artists mentioned in the text. Among the Bohemians garnered considerable praise from critics and readers alike. New York Times Book Review contributor Brooke Allen called it "comprehensive, … intimately knowledgeable, [and] marvelously charming." A Publishers Weekly contributor concluded, "Nicholson is able to communicate the ideals and desires of this generation without romanticizing it."