The Stephen Sisters: Ut Pictura Poesis

Book Reviews Volume 32:3, 1989 and the evocations of Montecassino and Sicily to the profound statement of some of Lawrence's major themes, presented here in an attractive and well-edited volume. Ian S. MacNiven SUNY Maritime College THE STEPHEN SISTERS: UT PICTURA POESIS Diane Filby Gillespie. The Sisters' Arts: The Writing and Painting of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1988. $32.00 AT A CONFERENCE ON VIRGINIA WOOLF at the University of Sussex in June of 1987, Jean Guiguet spoke about the spatiality of Virginia Woolfs fiction and enjoined his listeners further to investigate this important aspect of her writing. Diane Gillespie's handsome , lavishly produced book does so. It also speaks to a number of other issues: the influence of the visual arts upon the writing of Virginia Woolf, Woolfs relation with her sister Vanessa Bell, the mutual influence of the sisters upon each other's work, the need for a study of professional, rather than emotional, exchanges, the lack of studies about Vanessa Bell's art itself, the dearth of studies about women artists independent of male influences. Gillespie explains her purposes: "to shift the emphasis in the ongoing discussion of Virginia Woolf and the visual arts from Roger Fry to Vanessa Bell; to shift the emphasis in the discussions of the sisters from the psychological to the professional and aesthetic; and, in these contexts, to define and reveal more fully the pervasive role of the visual arts in Woolfs writing" (2). I am delighted that Gülespie explores the visual art's importance to Woolf and that she insists that women can be influenced by women. However, I fear that insistence may slightly skew her evidence. Gillespie virtually ignores the role of men (Leonard Woolf and Duncan Grant, for example) in these two women's lives. And in trying to "shift the emphasis" from Roger Fry to Vanessa Bell, she neglects the considerable importance of Fry's theories in Woolfs developing aesthetic. Furthermore, in focusing upon the sisters' mutual influencing, Gillespie tends to downplay their intense rivalry. Nevertheless, this as an important book. It thoroughly and insightfully makes use of both published and unpublished sources, including many previously unpublished writings by Vanessa Bell. Gillespie secured rights to reprint eighty-two illustrations (while her 364 Book Reviews Volume 32:3, 1989 publisher managed to price the book reasonably). These visual materials include black-and-white reproductions of Bell's paintings and of her illustrations for Woolfs books. Gillespie insists "in no way is any design [by Bell] a literal translation of the writing [by Woolf] into visual terms" (125); instead she shows how Bell's illustrations complemented Woolfs texts. Gillespie reproduces a number of other paintings (such as the moralistic Cocaine or the sentimental Dignity and Impudence) against whose assumptions about art both Bell and Woolf rebelled. These pictures are particularly useful to literary critics who may have only the vaguest idea of the sort of painting done by Edwin Landseer, or Alfred Priest, or Frederick Walker, or even G. F. Watts. Gülespie includes a most welcome set of previously unpublished early drawings by Virginia Stephen (Woolf). These drawings are literary and delicate. They suggest fascination with beautiful female faces (à la Rossetti) and strong male bodies (à la Blake). They establish how much visual talent Virginia possessed. GUlespie quotes delightful letters and memoirs in which, as Leonard Woolf wrote, "Vanessa developed a remarkable talent in a fantastic narrative of a labyrinthine domestic crisis" (An Autobiography, 2: 1911-1969 [Oxford University Press, 1980], 271). These texts establish that however nonverbal Vanessa claimed to be, she did possess considerable verbal gifts. Thus, though they shared talents across the visual and verbal spectrum, each sister's claiming one realm as exclusively her own was in part a way of staking out territory and daring the other to trespass. Gillespie does draw distinctions between the two artists: "Although both artists are concerned with perception, then, Woolf depicts the perceiver and the act of perception, while Bell asserts, through the size, darkness, and relationship of image to text, the importance of the objects perceived" (136); but generally her emphasis is upon their affinities. That emphasis can create...