Susan Sellers: Vanessa and Virginia, Sisters
Yesterday I read Vanessa and Virginia by Susan Sellers, a fictionalized account of the relationship between the sisters Vanessa Bell and Virginia Woolf. Sellers writes beautifully and easily; I sunk into this book effortlessly and loved every word of it. The themes of connection, dislocation, and helplessness coalesce around the roles the two sisters play to each other: mother, confidant, rival, and sympathizer.
Sellers tells the story from Vanessa’s point of view, shifting between a dominant present tense narrative and past tense, to pull the reader immediately into the conflicted, disharmonious lives of the two sisters. From their childhood in a house run through and by strict Victorian values of hard work, modesty and self-effacement, and where emotional outlets were few, affection was parceled out in stingy doses, and any female achievement was subdued and subservient to men, Sellers shows us the sisters as they are and as they will become, Vanessa more cooperative and Virginia more competitive, the scene facilitator versus the scene stealer, except they are never really against each other; they are together facing outwards. The book moves through to their relationship as adults, Vanessa as a painter, wife, and mother in a complicated family situation and Virginia as an increasingly successful writer, with recurring bouts of mental incapacity, and in a sexless but supportive marriage.
Freedom from their strict upbringing comes through deaths, first of their mother, then of their father. The freedom is both empowering and dislocating: they have to make up their own rules, figure out their own way. With freedom comes uncertainty and risk of failure; freedom cannot protect against pain and loss, and the sisters, having overcome the helplessness of their childhood — children bound by the rules of adults — are faced with adult helplessness, the inability to control the fates or acts of the ones they love.
The sisters are competitors but also intense lovers: I don’t mean this in the sexual sense but in the sense of how much they love each other, and how very deeply they understand each other, and need each other. They draw together and apart through the swells of their very different lives, Vanessa’s one of chaotic, ex-urban domesticity, Virginia’s one of an intellectual and urban (and urbane) writer. There are wonderful scenes of Vanessa describing what she has painted, and beautiful encapsulations of what her sister does with writing: “You were the one with words. You were the who knew how to take an event and describe it so that its essence was revealed….You would find a way of penetrating to the truth and enclosing what you found in words of such poetry that one’s heart would sing, even as it wept.”
The tensions that Vanessa feels between being a mother, both to her children and to Virginia, are perfectly wrought by Sellers with all the true nuances of the situation. I recognized the instinctual and overwhelming love Vanessa feels for her children: “I can still remember the awe of holding my newborn infant. A pact was established between us as I prized open his tiny fingers, and felt them curl tight again round mine. The gesture sealed a pledge to love and protect this child always.” But Vanessa realizes, as her children grow, that there is a desperate helplessness in trying to protect them, and a very different helplessness — a different kind of desperation — that cleaves her with guilt and longing, as she tries to pursue her painting and her creativity, while still holding together the domestic front.
Virginia’s conflicts are seen through Vanessa’s eyes, her accomplishments in writing coming up against her fears of abandonment and loneliness and darkness. Virginia is reaching new heights of success but she says, when faced with Vanessa’s life of children and lovers and mayhem, “Don’t you know I’d give up writing tomorrow if I could exchange it for one tiny piece of this?” Vanessa is grateful for words, for Virginia putting the “scraps of my life” into a whole that made sense but knows that Virginia would only give up writing if she gave up life.
When Virginia does give up life and writing, walking into the river with stones in her pockets, it is the final dislocation, and her final surrender to helplessness; Vanessa, the victim left alone on the shore, asks, “Did you remember me, Leonard, the children, as you left your stick on the bank and strode out into the swirling water, or were all your thoughts bent on escaping what you could no longer bear to endure?” The book ends with Vanessa seeking and finding the connection that endures between them: “You are right. What matters is that we do not stop creating.”
Sellers has created a novel that tells both the story of these two sisters but moves beyond to tell the story of how lives are constructed, how freedom is carved out from fate, and how all lives are burdened by what we cannot control. At one point in the novel, Vanessa explains what makes To the Lighthouse such a powerful novel: “Once again you told our story, yet this time you had done so in a way that bridged the gap between biography and art. You had painted Mother and Father with a surety that took my breath away. It was as if, by homing in on certain traits, you could give them to your reader with a directness that made them archetypal as well as vivid, instructive as well as real. You had freed them from the snares of memory and used them to reflect the deeper issues of human life. You had done all this in prose of such limpidity, such poignancy, that I could only marvel at your work.” I could take these sentences and apply them to what Susan Sellers has done in Vanessa and Virginia; my whole review could be just those sentences, replacing “Mother” and “Father “ with “Vanessa” and “Virginia” and be wholly accurate. I give my highest praise using her penetrating words for this beautiful book.
