Vanessa Bell and Charleston: Motherhood, Queerness and the Domestic Imagination

Vanessa Bell’s art and life were animated by the complex emotions of motherhood: creativity and care bound up with doubt, desire and ambivalence.This is the first book to focus exclusively on the influence of motherhood in Bell’s art, exploring how it shaped her creative vision and its lasting legacy at Charleston, her country home. In 1916 Bell moved with her young children and the painter Duncan Grant to Charleston, a remote farmhouse in the Sussex Downs that became a home for art, intimacy and experiment.There she lived until her death in 1961, creating a world where the boundaries between painting and living dissolved, and where care and collaboration lay at the heart of artistic life. Moving beyond familiar Bloomsbury biography, Vanessa Bell and Charleston offers a strikingly intimate portrait of Bell at work and at home, and how her art transformed the texture of everyday life.In a feminist and queer reappraisal of Bloomsbury, Jon King unearths Bell's experience of motherhood, an