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 based on my talk for Literature Cambridge’s summer programme 2024, and it’s about the writer Virginia Woolf’s relationship with her poet nephew, Julian Bell. In 1929, when Julian Bell was a student at King’s College, Cambridge, Virginia Woo…