Garnett, Angelica

Epithet: 1942 née Bell 2nd wife of David Garnett

British Library Archives and Manuscripts Catalogue : Person : Description : ark:/81055/vdc_100000000976.0x000354

Angelica Garnett (b. 1918), the daughter of the artist Vanessa Bell (Virginia Woolf's sister) and the artist Duncan Grant, believed until the age of 17 that her father was Clive Bell, her mother's husband and the man whose surname she bore. In 1942, she married the writer and publisher David Garnett (1892-1981), the former lover of her biological father, Duncan Grant. They had four daughters before separating. Her memoir Deceived with Kindness (London: Chatto and Windus/Hogarth Press, 1984), often highly critical of her mother and of Grant, won the 1985 J. R. Ackerley Prize for Autobiography.

From the description of Collection of 93 letters : various locations, to Richard Lipsett, 1978 May 29-2009 Dec. 28. (New York Public Library). WorldCat record id: 773296472

From the guide to the Collection of 93 letters : various locations, to Richard Lipsett, 1978 May 29-2009 Dec. 28, (The New York Public Library. Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature.)

Angelica Garnett was born on Christmas Day in 1918, the daughter of Vanessa Bell and the artist Duncan Grant. As a young child, Angelica was frequently injured or ill, but she was surrounded by 'admiring adults'. She had two fathers, a pseudo-grandfather in Roger Fry, two much older brothers, Julian and Quentin, and a devoted aunt, Virginia Woolf. As a girl, she studied and was fond of the fine arts, literature and history, but she made few substantial friends at the Longford Grove School in Essex, which she attended from 1929.

She left school at Easter 1935, visiting Rome and Paris in the next months, and returned to England to take up first acting and then art. During the period that followed Angelica was also confronted with a series of new relationships as she progressed through courtship and an affair with the artist David Garnett, and discovered that Clive Bell was not her father, a fact long known in Bloomsbury circles.

In 1942, Angelica married David Garnett, despite parental opposition. Her mother, Vanessa, was reconciled to the relationship by the arrival of four grandaughters - Amaryllis, Henrietta, Nerissa and Frances - and Angelica and her parents often went on holiday together thereafter. The relationship with Garnett eventually crumbled, however, and the two separated sometime before 1961. After her mother's death in that year, Angelica spent much time with her father, Duncan Grant, at Charleston. When he died in 1978 she began to live there again and has since become an active member of the Charleston Trust. She later moved to the south of France.

From the guide to the The Papers of Angelica Garnett (nee Bell), 1917-1980, (King's College Archive Centre, Cambridge)