Angelica Garnett

Deceived With Kindness

Just finished reading Deceived With Kindness, the 1985 memoir of Angelica Garnett, daughter of Bloomsbury Group artist Vanessa Bell. Set variously in France, Gordon Square and especially Charleston, a house in the village of Firle in rural Sussex, it’s the story of a lifelong battle to establish a clear picture of her own identity.

Surrounded as Angelica was by some of the great artists and thinkers of the day - Virginia Woolf, John Maynard Keynes, Roger Fry, Lytton Strachey - it’s not surprising she might have found it hard to establish a sense of self. But her task was made massively more complex by the fact that, during the summer of 1937 at the age of 17, she learned from Vanessa that her father was not Vanessa’s husband, the art critic and theorist Clive Bell, but the painter Duncan Grant: “Although Vanessa comforted herself with the pretence that I had two fathers, in reality - emotional reality, that is - I had none.”

Then in 1942 to Vanessa’s horror and the consternation of longstanding friends Angelica married David “Bunny” Garnett, a writer and publisher more than 25 years her senior, highlights of his personal CV being that he:

• was Duncan’s former lover

• had tried to seduce Vanessa but been rejected

• when Angelica was born, had boasted cradle-side that he would marry her

Angelica clarifies that she loses her virginity with Bunny “in, appropriately enough, HG Wells' spare bedroom.”

Deceived With Kindness begins with Angelica living in London in 1975, separated from Bunny and with Amaryllis, the oldest of their four daughters, having drowned in the Thames two years previously, “a prey to loneliness and regret… not so much unhappy as disorientated.”

Angelica Garnett

Vanessa Bell

Duncan Grant