GC The Garden at Charleston - Vanessa Bell

GC The Garden at Charleston

Vanessa Stephen (Bell) was the elder daughter of Sir Leslie Stephen and Julia Prinsep Duckworth.[1] The family included her sister Virginia (Woolf), brothers Thoby (1880–1906) and Adrian (1883–1948), half-sister Laura (1870–1945) whose mother was Harriett Thackeray and half-brothers George and Gerald Duckworth; they lived at 22 Hyde Park Gate, Westminster, London. She was educated at home in languages, mathematics and history, and took drawing lessons from Ebenezer Cook before she attended Sir Arthur Cope's art school in 1896. She then studied painting at the Royal Academy in 1901.

Vanessa, Clive, Duncan Grant, and Duncan's lover David Garnett moved to the Sussex countryside shortly before the outbreak of the First World War, and settled at Charleston Farmhouse near Firle, East Sussex. John Maynard Keynes was also a close friend and frequent member of the household, until his marriage to Lydia Lopokova, whom Bell disliked.

Later in life, she said that during her childhood she had been sexually abused by her half-brothers, George and Gerald Duckworth.