Angelica Garnett

Angelica Vanessa Garnett (née Bell; 25 December 1918 – 4 May 2012), was a British writer, painter and artist. She was the author of the memoir Deceived with Kindness, an account of her experience growing up at the heart of the Bloomsbury Group.

Family background Angelica Garnett was born at Charleston Farmhouse in East Sussex on Christmas Day 1918. She was the biological daughter of the painter Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell; her aunt was Virginia Woolf.

Until the summer of 1937, when Garnett was 18, she believed her biological father was Clive Bell, Vanessa's husband, rather than the mostly homosexual Grant, although the reality was an open secret within their immediate Bloomsbury circle. In fact, although there was no formal separation or divorce, the Bells' marriage had come to an end in 1916. In that year, Vanessa rented Charleston Farmhouse from the Gage estate, so that Duncan Grant, with whom she had fallen in love, and his lover, David Garnett, could work there as farm labourers; both were conscientious objectors. Grant and Vanessa Bell continued to live together after the presumed end of their sexual relationship. Clive Bell would visit at weekends. Vanessa comforted herself with the idea that her daughter had two fathers; "in reality," Angelica wrote, "I had none".

Education Angelica Garnett grew up at Charleston, indulged by her mother and surrounded by the artists, writers and intellectuals of the Bloomsbury Group. After her 14th birthday, Virginia Woolf gave Angelica a clothing budget of £100 a year.

At the age of ten she was sent to boarding school at Langford Grove in Essex. She left without any qualifications, spent several months living in Rome and in 1935 moved for a time to Paris, staying with the artist Zoum Walter and her writer husband Francois. She changed to the study of art at the Euston Road School, where she was taught by William Coldstream and Victor Pasmore, the latter of whom apparently reduced her to tears. Angelica had four daughters with Garnett—Amaryllis, Henrietta, Nerissa, and Frances.

Garnett was a member of her parents' circle and a former lover of Duncan Grant, her father. When Angelica was born, Garnett had written to Lytton Strachey saying of the baby: "Its beauty is the remarkable thing … I think of marrying it; when she is 20 I shall be 46 – will it be scandalous?" Angelica lost her virginity to Garnett in H. G. Wells's spare bedroom. In those characteristics it was a departure from much of the coverage the Bloomsbury Group had received up to that time. In it Garnett wrote, "My dream of the perfect father – unrealized – possessed me, and has done so for the rest of my life. My marriage was but a continuation of it, and almost engulfed me."

Garnett was the author of a second memoir, The Eternal Moment (1998), and published a volume of autobiographical fiction entitled The Unspoken Truth: A Quartet of Bloomsbury Stories (2010).

Garnett was actively involved in the efforts that saw Charleston restored and opened to the public as a museum. She advised on the reconstruction of its fabrics, and on the selection and application of pigments; also talking at festivals and giving fund-raising lectures, including in America. In 1994 she donated more than 8000 sketches and drawings by Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell to The Charleston Trust.

Children With David Garnett, Angelica had four daughters: Amaryllis Virginia (1943–1973), an actress; Henrietta (1945–2019), a writer; Nerissa, called Nel (1946–2004), a painter, photographer and ceramics artist; and Nel's twin Frances, called Fanny (b. 1946), who farms in France.

When Henrietta Garnett was 17 she married Lytton Burgo Partridge, the son of Frances Partridge, who was the sister of David Garnett's first wife. Burgo Partridge died from a heart attack less than a year later, three weeks after the birth of their daughter, Sophie Vanessa. Amaryllis Garnett drowned in the Thames in 1973; she was 29. Nerissa Garnett died from a brain tumour in 2004.