What We're Reading: Jami Recommends

Virginia Woolf was brilliant – there’s no disputing that. But until reading this novel, I hadn’t considered just how difficult it must have been to live with her.

In Vanessa and Her Sister, author Priya Parmar concocts a diary by painter Vanessa Stephen Bell to show what it might have been like to be Virginia’s sister. If someone had told me that Vanessa’s diary actually existed, I would have believed it without question: Parmar’s voice as Vanessa is that convincing. When I finished the book, I wanted to delve right into a biography of Vanessa. She suddenly seems infinitely more interesting than her literary sister.

This novel is more than a look at two sisters and their family, however. We are also witnesses to the 1905 birth of the famous Bloomsbury Group, a circle of friends that included not only the Stephen sisters, but also novelist E. M. Forster, economist John Maynard Keynes, and biographer Lytton Strachey, among others.

Vanessa and Her Sister is the best kind of historical fiction. It’s effortlessly immersive. It’s informative and well-written. It provides context and new insights. And it’s fun.