Deceived With Kindness: A Bloomsbury Childhood

Angelica Garnett may truly be called a child of Bloomsbury. Her aunt was Virginia Woolf, her mother Vanessa Bell, and her father Duncan Grant, though for many years Angelica believed herself, naturally enough, the daughter of Vanessa's husband Clive. Her childhood homes, Charleston in Sussex and Gordon Square in London, were both centres of Bloomsbury activity, and she grew up surrounded by the most talked-about writers and artists of the day - Leonard and Virginia Woolf, Roger Fry, the Stracheys, Maynard Keynes and many others. In 1942 she married David Garnett, but they later separated. In 1993 she published Deceived with Kindness, an extraordinarily frank memoir about her childhood, which won the J.R. Ackerley Prize for Autobiography. She is a painter and has lived in France for many years.