'Charming and violent and gifted'

Virginia Woolf and her nephew Julian Bell

Julian Bell around 1928. Photographer unknown.

Hello and welcome to Cambridge Ladies’ Dining Society. This essay is about the writer Virginia Woolf’s relationship with sister Vanessa Bell’s oldest son, the poet Julian Bell. In 1929, when Julian was a student at King’s College, Cambridge, Virginia wrote to Vanessa: ‘I daresay he’ll give you a lot of trouble before he’s done… he’s too charming and violent and gifted altogether.’ Woolf was right in that Vanessa’s much-loved firstborn child would cause her great pain, but not in ways anyone could have predicted.

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Picasso, sketch of weeping woman 16 June 1937, Tate Modern