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Take part in a generational journey. See how Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell were inspired by the Pattle Sisters in this captivating talk by Dr. Marion Dell.
Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell were founder members, along with their brothers and some friends, of the Bloomsbury Group. Their mother was Julia Prinsep Stephen. Her mother was Maria Jackson, one of the famous Pattle sisters. Throughout her life Virginia Woolf recreated stories of these exuberant forebears, especially her great-aunt, Julia Margaret Cameron. Vanessa Bell found inspiration for her painting. The sisters cherished albums of their Pattle family photographs and took their portraits with them when they moved to Bloomsbury. This illustrated talk shows how much the creative life of the Bloomsbury sisters was influenced by the amazing Pattle sisters.
Dr Marion Dell has taught in a number of countries, most recently as a lecturer for the Open University. Now retired, she is a freelance lecturer and writer, focusing especially on the life and work of Virginia Woolf. Dr. Marion Dell contributed an easy to the publication accompanying the Women of Influence exhibition at Watts.
Her other published works include Virginia Woolf’s Influential Forebears: Julia Margaret Cameron, Anny Thackeray Ritchie and Julia Prinsep Stephen (London: Palgrave Macmillan 2015). Material about Woolf’s forebears, including the Pattle sisters, can be found on her website.
Marion also researches and lectures on the literary history of her local area, around Hindhead and Haslemere and has published The Rise and Fall of the English Switzerland, about the bohemian artistic colony there in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries