AS WITH THE EARLIER BOOK, many have displayed great kindness and helpfulness in the present work. My greatest debt is to William Abrahams, my collaborator and companion from 1961 until his death in 1998. Quentin and Olivier Bell’s help was crucial for the earlier book as was that of Julian’s sister, Angelica Garnett. My greatest present debt is to Olivier for her extraordinary kindnesses, and I am grateful again to Angelica Bell as well. The passage of time has meant that I have also benefited from the interest, support, and help of the next generation, particularly Julian Bell, his uncle’s namesake, as well as his sister Virginia. I should state again gratitude to those who provided help for the earlier book: Sir Harold Acton, Lord Annan, A. C. Cochrane, Richard Eberhart, T. C. Elliott, E. M. Forster, David Garnett, Grace Higgins, John Lehmann, Charles Mauron, Christopher and Helen Morris, Sir Edward Playfair, Lettice Ramsey, Sir Richard Rees, G.W.H. Rylands, Ivor and Dorothea Richards, J. Duncan Wood, and Leonard Woolf. In the writing of this book I have incurred new and considerable debts of gratitude, particularly to the wise readers of the manuscript, Peter Mandler, S. P. Rosenbaum, and Patricia Laurence. Others too have been very helpful, such as Richard Baxell, William Beekman, Susan Bell, Ying Chinnery, Peter Davis, Wendy Hitchmough, Glen Leonard, Isabelle Lescent-Giles, and the splendid staff of the History Department at Stanford University. For help in moving forward the publication of the book, I am indebted to Thomas Wallace and Christopher Sinclair-Stevenson. I’ve much enjoyed working with that excellent editor Norris Pope of Stanford University Press as well as his extremely helpful colleagues, John Feneron and Sarah Crane Newman, and particularly the meticulous and encouraging copyediting of Jeff Wyneken. An immense thanks for the endless guidance and help of Patricia MacGuire of the Archive Centre at King’s College, Cambridge, where the vast majority of Bloomsbury manuscript material is to be found. I also enjoyed the hospitality of my old College, King’s, during my visits, and particularly of its librarian, Peter Jones.
I am grateful to the holders of copyright who have given permission for quotations. (I have followed the convention of not requesting permission for less than four hundred words and apologize to copyright owners who may feel I have erred in that course of action. I also apologize to the copyright holders of some of the illustrations, whom I have not been able to locate.) For longer quotations I am grateful to the Society of Authors, as the literary representative of the estate of Virginia Woolf, for permission to quote from her writings other than her published diaries and letters. For the latter, I am grateful for permission to quote from the diaries and letters of Virginia Woolf, in the United Kingdom from the Random House Group Ltd. as published by the Hogarth Press, and in the United States from as follows: Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann, eds., The Letters of Virginia Woolf, Vols. I (1975), II (1978), III (1977), IV (1978), V (1979), and VI (1980); Anne Olivier Bell, ed., The Diary ofVirginia Woolf, Vols. I (1979), II (1978), III (1980), IV (1982), and V (1984). I also acknowledge the following: letters of Vanessa Bell, © The Estate of Vanessa Bell, courtesy of Henrietta Garnett; extracts from unpublished works of Julian Bell, © 2011 The Estate of Julian Bell, as well as for permission to quote his previously published works; extracts from unpublished works of Quentin Bell, © 2011 The Estate of Quentin Bell; and the Society of Authors as the literary representative of the Julian Bell and Quentin Bell estates. I extend special thanks to Jeremy Crow, its head of Literary Estates, for his gracious aid in administrating the permissions for Virginia Woolf and Vanessa, Julian, and Quentin Bell. I am also grateful to Lettice Ramsey’s daughter, Jane Burch, for her permission to quote her mother’s letters and reproduce her photographs. And I am grateful to Ann Morris Dizikes for permission to print two photographs taken by her mother. The images Virginia and Julian at Blean and Lettice Ramsey, © 2010 Tate, London, are courtesy of Tate Britain. Quotations from John Lehmann, The Whispering Gallery (Longmans, Green), are by permission of the publisher.
I apologize if the citation of quotations appears to be erratic. This became a problem because in the earlier study, most often for concerns of privacy, some quotations were not cited. Now, forty-five years on, it is no longer possible to recover the sources for some of those quotations. Also, quotations from letters that are or were in private collections are generally cited only the first time they are quoted. Some quotations are not cited when their source is clear from the text.
Peter Stansky
Stanford, California
December 2010