Vanessa & Virginia

A delectable little book for anyone who ever admired the Bloomsbury group, Sellers’s first novel speaks in painter Vanessa Bell’s voice as she addresses her sister, Virginia Woolf. The story includes everything one ever imagined that happened in the intimate lives of the sisters and their astounding circle, which burst upon late Victorian England and shattered both the artistic and cultural boundaries of the times. Sellers begins during the girls’ childhood with their beloved brother, and as they grow up, she taps into the incest, sexual encounters and homoerotic love with and among the many great minds of the era. The fictional world the author has recreated—of the sisters striving to perfect their respective art forms while trying to keep the reality of children and war and illness at bay—is full of color and intellectual promise and laced with despair and untimely deaths. While the mix of first- and second-person perspectives gets tedious (there are many variations on the theme of “I sensed you watching me”), the narrative’s a genuine treat for Bloomsbury fans and those at least vaguely familiar with the milieu. (May)