Angelica Garnett

Angelica Vanessa Garnett (née Bell; 25 December 1918 – 4 May 2012), was a British writer, painter and artist. She was the author of the memoir ''Deceived with Kindness'' (1984), an account of her experience growing up at the heart of the Bloomsbury Group.

Family background

Angelica Garnett was born at Charleston Farmhouse in East Sussex on Christmas Day 1918."Angelica Garnett: 25th December 1918 – 4th May 2012"
The Charleston Trust, 4 May 2012. Retrieved 2012-10-24. She was the biological daughter of the painter Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell; her aunt was Virginia Woolf.

Until the summer of 1937, when Garnett was 18, she believed her biological father was Clive Bell, Vanessa's husband, rather than the mostly homosexual Grant, although the reality was an open secret within their immediate Bloomsbury circle. Spalding, Frances,
"Angelica Garnett obituary"
The Guardian, 7 May 2012. Retrieved 2012-10-24. In fact, although there was no formal separation or divorce, the Bells' marriage had come to an end in 1916. In that year, Vanessa rented Charleston Farmhouse from the Gage estate, so that Duncan Grant, with whom she had fallen in love, and his lover, David Garnett, could work there as farm labourers; both were conscientious objectors. Grant and Vanessa Bell continued to live together after the presumed end of their sexual relationship. Clive Bell would visit at weekends.

When Vanessa Bell informed her daughter of her true parentage she advised her not to talk about it. The deception avoided servant gossip and preserved the possibility of a legacy from Clive Bell's father who had settled allowances on his grandchildren. Angelica grew up believing that two of those grandchildren, Vanessa and Clive's sons, Julian Bell, who was killed in 1937 during the Spanish Civil War, and the art historian Quentin Bell, were her biological brothers, rather than her biological half-brothers.Fox, Margalit
"Angelica Garnett, Writer of Frank Memoir of Bloomsbury Childhood, Dies at 93"
''The New York Times'', 12 May 2012. Retrieved 2012-10-24."The Papers of Angelica Garnett (née Bell)"
King's College, Cambridge. Retrieved 2012-10-24.Levy, Paul
"Angelica Garnett: Painter and writer who grew up in the dysfunctional Bloomsbury set"
The Independent, 14 May 2012. Retrieved 2012-10-24. Vanessa comforted herself with the idea that her daughter had two fathers; "in reality," Angelica wrote, "I had none"."Obituary: Angelica Garnett"
The Daily Telegraph, 7 May 2012. Retrieved 2012-10-24.

Education

Angelica Garnett grew up at Charleston, indulged by her mother and surrounded by the artists, writers and intellectuals of the Bloomsbury Group. After her 14th birthday, Virginia Woolf gave Angelica a clothing budget of £100 a year.

At the age of ten she was sent to boarding school at Langford Grove in Essex. She left without any qualifications, spent several months living in Rome and in 1935 moved for a time to Paris, staying with the artist Zoum Walter and her writer husband Francois. In 1936 Angelica went to the London Theatre Studio to train, briefly, as an actress under Michel Saint-Denis and George Devine. She changed to the study of art at the Euston Road School, where she was taught by William Coldstream and Victor Pasmore, the latter of whom apparently reduced her to tears.

Marriage

In 1942, aged 24, Angelica married David Garnett, by then an editor, reviewer and novelist whose parents were Edward Garnett and Constance Garnett, the noted translator of Russian literature. The relationship had begun in the spring of 1938, when Garnett was married to his first wife, Rachel "Ray" Marshall, who was dying of cancer. Angelica had four daughters with Garnett—Amaryllis, Henrietta, Nerissa, and Frances.

Garnett was a member of her parents' circle, a former lover of Duncan Grant who had also attempted to seduce Vanessa Bell. When Angelica was born, Garnett had written to Lytton Strachey saying of the baby: ''"Its beauty is the remarkable thing … I think of marrying it; when she is 20 I shall be 46 – will it be scandalous?"'' In fact Garnett was nearly 50 at the time of their marriage. Despite their consternation, Angelica's parents did not inform their daughter of these details of Garnett's past, although various associates of the family did attempt to warn her against the marriage: John Maynard Keynes had her to tea.Rustin, Susann
"Bloomsbury secrets and lies"
The Guardian, 16 January 2010. Retrieved 2012-10-24. Angelica lost her virginity to Garnett in H.G. Wells's spare bedroom.

The couple moved to Hilton Hall, Cambridgeshire, which David Garnett had bought in 1924. His novella, ''Aspects of Love'' (1955), dedicated to Angelica and involving similarly complicated domestic arrangements, was later adapted into a highly successful musical by Andrew Lloyd Webber. The Garnetts separated in 1967.

For a time Angelica was in love with George Bergen, a Russian-Jewish painter who had been another of Duncan Grant's lovers, but the relationship did not last.

Memoir

In 1984 Angelica Garnett published her memoir, ''Deceived with Kindness: A Bloomsbury Childhood''. The book was direct and sharply critical in its description of her upbringing and relationship with her parents, revealing Bloomsbury's rather conventional inability to confront deep personal feelings.Watney, Simon
"Canvas 34: A Studio of One's Own"
The Charleston Trust, July 2012, pp.4–10. Retrieved 2012-10-24. In those characteristics it was a departure from much of the coverage the Bloomsbury Group had received up to that time.Malcolm, Janet
"Sisters, Lovers, Tarts and Friends"
''The New York Times'', 3 March 1996. Retrieved 2012-10-24. In it Garnett wrote, ''"My dream of the perfect father – unrealized – possessed me, and has done so for the rest of my life. My marriage was but a continuation of it, and almost engulfed me."'' The memoir was awarded the J. R. Ackerley Prize for Autobiography in 1985.

Garnett was the author of a second memoir, ''The Eternal Moment'' (1998), and published a volume of autobiographical fiction entitled ''The Unspoken Truth: A Quartet of Bloomsbury Stories'' (2010). At the time of her death she had been working on an autobiography.

Later life and work

After the end of her marriage, Angelica Garnett moved to Islington, north London. She moved back to Charleston after the death of Duncan Grant in 1978, before moving to nearby Ringmer and then to France. Garnett had spent long parts of her childhood staying in the south of France, mostly at Cassis, near Marseilles.

Garnett was actively involved in the efforts that saw Charleston restored and opened to the public as a museum. She advised on the reconstruction of its fabrics, and on the selection and application of pigments; also talking at festivals and giving fund-raising lectures, including in America. In 1994 she donated more than 8000 sketches and drawings by Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell to The Charleston Trust.

Angelica Garnett continued to paint, developing a reputation, mostly for still lifes, and exhibiting in Europe and America. She also worked with mosaics, designed book jackets and textiles, decorated pots, and, in the 1980s, began to create sculptures using found objects and materials.

The last 30 years of her life were spent in Forcalquier in the south of France. Angelica Garnett died in Aix-en-Provence on 4 May 2012.Acte de Decès, Copie Intégrale, No. 0000743 / 2012, Direction Générale Adjointe, Ville d'Aix-en-Provence: Angelica Vanessa Bell, died at 2.00 am, 4 May 2012, 25 avenue Alfred Capus

Children

With David Garnett, Angelica had four daughters: Amaryllis Virginia (1943–1973), an actress; Henrietta (1945–2019), a writer; Nerissa, called Nel (1946–2004), a painter, photographer and ceramics artist; and Nel's twin Frances, called Fanny (b. 1946), who farms in France.

When Henrietta Garnett was 17 she married Lytton Burgo Partridge, the son of Frances Partridge, who was the sister of David Garnett's first wife. Burgo Partridge died from a heart attack less than a year later, three weeks after the birth of their daughter, Sophie Vanessa. Amaryllis Garnett drowned in the Thames in 1973; she was 29. Nerissa Garnett died from a brain tumour in 2004.

References

Further reading

*Garnett, Angelica. ''Deceived with Kindness: A Bloomsbury Childhood''. London: Chatto & Windus (1984)
*Soleil, Christian. ''Conversations avec Angelica Garnett''. Paris: Edilivre (2014)
*Knights, Sarah. ''Bloomsbury's Outsider: A Life of David Garnett''. Bloomsbury Reader, Paperback and Digital, (15 May 2015), , 632 pages.

External links

Charleston farmhouse
*

{{DEFAULTSORT:Garnett, Angelica
1918 births
2012 deaths
20th-century English painters
20th-century English women artists
20th-century English women writers
21st-century English painters
21st-century English women artists
21st-century English women writers
Alumni of the London Theatre Studio
People from Firle
Stephen-Bell family
Bloomsbury Group
English memoirists
British expatriates in France
Angelica
English women painters
English women non-fiction writers
British women memoirists