Clarissa Dalloway, the heroine of one of Virginia Woolf’s best-loved novels, is “always giving parties to cover the silence”. The story, Mrs Dalloway, closely follows a London society hostess as she prepares for an evening of sharing her hospitality while quietly battling a depressive illness. After Woolf’s tragic suicide in 1941, the novel’s theme acquired a sombre significance.
Now an enigmatic painting, one that had gone missing for 60 years and which is intimately linked to the book, has come to light. The picture, painted by Woolf’s sister, the artist Vanessa Bell, was given to Woolf just before she began to write early drafts of Mrs Dalloway, and is now to go on public display for the first time in almost 100 years. It depicts the glamorous guests at a party much like the occasion at the centre of Woolf’s novel.
Bell’s work, now known as Mrs Dalloway’s Party, will feature in an exhibition in London from 9-25 November of the work of the artists of the Bloomsbury group curated by Kim Jones, vice-president of Charleston, Bell’s Sussex home and studio. Other works in the show at Sotheby’s, including a rare block-print silk robe by the artist Percy Wyndham Lewis made in the Omega workshop run by the Bloomsbury set, are also on loan from Charleston.
Bryn Sayles, the modern British and Irish art specialist at the auction house, said: “Like the Bell painting, the gown speaks of a new period of social and sexual freedom. It is such a vibrant print, and it demonstrates how the artists working together then believed art and everyday life should be able to meet in fashion.
“The party is such a famous scene in the novel, and the painting, which is now up for sale, shows people in 1920s garb who may well be people the sisters knew,” said Sayles. “This is why its relationship with Virginia’s writing is so interesting. There’s nothing written down about how it inspired her, but there are other examples of Woolf writing in response to Vanessa’s art. Her picture A Conversation, painted between 1913 and 1916, is accepted to have inspired Woolf’s 1921 short story A Society.”
Unlike most of Bell’s work, it is neither a still life nor a portrait. Some fans of the novel, which is set on a single June day in 1923 in Mayfair, have recently speculated about the role of the painting in sparking Woolf’s imagination, but it has not been possible to see it.
“Vanessa very rarely did narrative pieces of art,” said Sayles. “She painted it in 1920 and it was exhibited two years later under the title The Party.” However, when Hogarth Press published Woolf’s novel in 1925, a simpler yellow and black design by Bell was used on the dust jacket.
Art experts have also wondered why Bell’s picture disappeared soon after it was given to the author, only to reappear briefly in 1985 when Woolf’s nephew, Quentin Bell, disposed of her estate. At the time the painting was put up for sale by the art dealer Anthony d’Offay under the new title of Mrs Dalloway’s Party.
“It’s not clear whether this is the name it had always been given in the family,” said Sayles, “or whether it was d’Offay who realised that’s what it must be. After all, Woolf had also initially called this book The Party.”
The novel follows Clarissa, a character who appears elsewhere in Woolf’s fiction, as she gets ready to throw a celebration for her husband, a Tory politician. Mrs Dalloway, the reader is told, regards her hospitality as her gift to her talented friends. She describes it as “an offering”, although some of her guests have “criticised her very unfairly, laughed at her very unjustly, for her parties”. The idea for the book had developed from two of Woolf’s previous short stories, Mrs Dalloway in Bond Street and The Prime Minister. Another draft of the longer novel was first called The Hours – the name which went on to be used as the title of the acclaimed Michael Cunningham novel about both Woolf and Mrs Dalloway, which was filmed in 2002.
The Bell painting was bought from d’Offay by the American playwright Howard Ginsberg, who kept it in his San Francisco home for the next 40 years, eventually writing a play called The Mysterious Gift to Virginia Woolf about the hidden importance of the work to the two sisters.
“Ginsberg was clearly fascinated by it, although there is no definite proof of its influence,” said Sayles. “He has also done a lot of research about the people in the painting. But the play is not just interesting because of the novel, but also because of the picture it gives of a time of great change, when the codes of social behaviour exploded and a particular avant-garde set became much more permissive.”
Woolf’s flowing narrative weaves the story of Dalloway’s day with that of an ex-soldier who, like Clarissa, is struggling with mental illness. During the party, news of his suffering becomes a topic of conversation. In her introduction to the Wordsworth Classic edition of the novel, the critic Merry M Pawlowski claimed: “A woman’s party, and the preparations which go with it, provide the perfect vehicle.”
But the question lingers: was it the painting that first gave Woolf the idea for her novel?
