Vanessa and Virginia

Vanessa and Virginia are sisters, best friends, bitter rivals, and artistic collaborators. As children, they fight for attention from their overextended mother, their brilliant but difficult father, and their adored brother, Thoby. As young women, they support each other through a series of devastating deaths, then emerge in bohemian Bloomsbury, bent on creating new lives and groundbreaking works of art.

Through everything—marriage, lovers, loss, madness, children, success and failure—the sisters remain the closest of co-conspirators. But they also betray each other.

In this lyrical, impressionistic account, written as a love letter and elegy from Vanessa to Virginia, Sellers imagines her way into the heart of the lifelong relationship between writer Virginia Woolf and painter Vanessa Bell. With sensitivity, imagination, and fidelity to what is known of both lives, Sellers has created a powerful portrait of sibling rivalry.

Published in the UK by Two Ravens Press in June 2008, and in the US and Canada by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in June 2009, Susan Sellers’s acclaimed novel Vanessa and Virginia has also been translated into Chinese, Dutch, French, Spanish, Swedish and Turkish.

Further translations are forthcoming, including in Japan (Sairyusha), Portugal (Editora Presenca), Finland (Into), Russia (Atticus), Brazil (Novo Seculo), Lithuania (Gimtasis Zodis), Korea (Image Box), Poland (Weltbild) and Italy (Minimum Fax: BEAT Edizione)