Press Reviews

• LITERARY REVIEW

  An outstanding work, and reading it is a source of real pleasure ... one of the best books on Virginia Woolf to date

• SUNDAY TIMES

  Her unlayering of this complex relationship is subtle and far-reaching ...The wealth of the material makes possible some of the brilliant equations to be found in this book

• OBSERVER

  Dunn plunges deep beneath the surface to the complicated emotions and personalities of these two women, illuminating them with great clarity and understanding.

• INDEPENDENT

  Jane Dunn's astute account of their relationship is a revealing pleasure.

• Angelica Garnett

  By presenting us with a double portrait, its two subjects seen in relation to each other rather than in isolation, we come so much nearer the living reality, in all its complexity, its double-sidedness, its light and shadow. This is one of the few books which allows me to believe that the author actually knew both my mother and my aunt, and I welcome it as deepening my understanding both of them and their relation to Bloomsbury

• Suzanne Raitt

  Times Literary Review

  Dunn is excellent on the many rivalries and hostilities between the sisters, and on Virginia's betrayal of Vanessa through her affair with Vanessa's husband, Clive Bell, while Vanessa was struggling to cope with their first baby. Virginia threatens to take over the book as she at times took over her sister's life: always cleverer, more talkative, wittier and with a greater gift for intimacy. But in the end Vanessa's impassivity, her enigmatic silence, hold their own against Virginia's flirtatiousness. Dunn rightly emphasises the obsessive depth of each sister's commitment to work

• Literary Review

  An outstanding work, and reading it is a source of real pleasure... one of the best books on Virginia Woolf to date

• Sunday Times

  Her unlayering of this complex relationship is subtle and far-reaching... The wealth of the material makes possible some of the brilliant equations to be found in this book

• Observer

  Dunn plunges deep beneath the surface to the complicated emotions and personalities of these two women, illuminating them with great clarity and understanding

• Independent

  Jane Dunn's astute account of their relationship is a revealing pleasure

• New York Times

  [An] intriguing study of the relationship between the two sisters... an investigation into the dynamics of friendship and sibling rivalry, maternal solicitude and mutual need

• Publishers Weekly

  Dunn takes advantage of the voluminous letters, diaries, family papers and published writings of the Stephen/Woolf/Bell milieu in reconstructing a passionate and competitive sisterhood... [a] detailed portrait of their intimacy

• Kirkus

  With sensitivity and imagination, Dunn recreates the fascination, dependencies, competition, complicity, jealousies, the whole range of dynamics expressed in the pathologically close sibling relationship between two beautiful, talented, brilliant, intense, and creative women

• Nigel Nicolson

  A sensitive and deeply interesting description of a relationship between two remarkable sisters who jointly created the Bloomsbury Group. I found Jane Dunn's account of their distinct but intertwined lives and personalities utterly absorbing