ABSTRACT
Chapter 4, ‘Vanessa and Virginia’ studies various literary representations of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell’s complex sisterly relationship by comparing Susan Sellers’s Vanessa and Virginia (2009), Priya Parmar’s Vanessa and Her Sister (2014) and Kyo Maclear and Isabelle Arsenault’s Virginia Wolf (2012). These authors highlight different aspects of the sisters’ multifaceted bond: their similarities, complementarity, alliances, rivalry, dualities, antagonisms, psychological tug-of-war, betrayals, mutual love and influence. The authors adopt or challenge accepted biographical premises of the sisters’ dualism and fictionalise their interactions and confrontations. The chapter starts by exploring Maclear and Arsenault’s Manichean representation of the siblings as little girls in a fairy tale, then Parmar’s soap-operatic choice of heavily accentuating the young sisters’ rivalry, and ends with Sellers’s merging of these dichotomies, as her nuanced depictions of Vanessa and Virginia are superimposed to the extent of becoming symbiotic. The sisters’ portraits examined in this chapter are to be found at the confluence between the poetic and the pictorial and borrow from both Woolf’s and Bell’s arts.
