1. Angelica Garnett was the author of the memoir Deceived with Kindness, an account of her experience growing up at the heart of the Bloomsbury Group.
24 Facts About Angelica Garnett
1. 2.
Angelica Garnett was born at Charleston Farmhouse in East Sussex on Christmas Day 1918.
3.
Angelica Garnett was the biological daughter of the painter Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell; her aunt was Virginia Woolf.
4.
Until the summer of 1937, when Garnett was 18, she believed her biological father was Clive Bell, Vanessa's husband, rather than the mostly homosexual Grant, although the reality was an open secret within their immediate Bloomsbury circle.
5.
Angelica Garnett grew up believing that two of those grandchildren, Vanessa and Clive's sons, Julian Bell, who was killed in 1937 during the Spanish Civil War, and the art historian Quentin Bell, were her biological brothers, rather than her biological half-brothers.
6.
Vanessa comforted herself with the idea that her daughter had two fathers; "in reality," Angelica Garnett wrote, "I had none".
7.
Angelica Garnett grew up at Charleston, indulged by her mother and surrounded by the artists, writers and intellectuals of the Bloomsbury Group.
8.
Angelica Garnett left without any qualifications, spent several months living in Rome and in 1935 moved for a time to Paris, staying with the artist Zoum Walter and her writer husband Francois.
9.
In 1936 Angelica Garnett went to the London Theatre Studio to train, briefly, as an actress under Michel Saint-Denis and George Devine.
10.
Angelica Garnett changed to the study of art at the Euston Road School, where she was taught by William Coldstream and Victor Pasmore, the latter of whom apparently reduced her to tears.
11.
In 1942, aged 24, Angelica married David Garnett, by then an editor, reviewer and novelist whose parents were Edward Garnett and Constance Garnett, the noted translator of Russian literature.
12.
The relationship had begun in the spring of 1938, when Angelica Garnett was married to his first wife, Rachel "Ray" Marshall, who was dying of cancer.
13.
Angelica Garnett was a member of her parents' circle and a former lover of Duncan Grant, her father.
14.
The couple moved to Hilton Hall, Cambridgeshire, which David Angelica Garnett had bought in 1924.
15.
In 1984 Angelica Garnett published her memoir, Deceived with Kindness: A Bloomsbury Childhood.
16.
Angelica Garnett was the author of a second memoir, The Eternal Moment, and published a volume of autobiographical fiction entitled The Unspoken Truth: A Quartet of Bloomsbury Stories.
17.
Angelica Garnett moved back to Charleston after the death of Duncan Grant in 1978, before moving to nearby Ringmer and then to France.
18.
Angelica Garnett had spent long parts of her childhood staying in the south of France, mostly at Cassis, near Marseilles.
19.
Angelica Garnett was actively involved in the efforts that saw Charleston restored and opened to the public as a museum.
20.
Angelica Garnett advised on the reconstruction of its fabrics, and on the selection and application of pigments; talking at festivals and giving fund-raising lectures, including in America.
21.
Angelica Garnett continued to paint, developing a reputation, mostly for still lifes, and exhibiting in Europe and America.
22.
Angelica Garnett worked with mosaics, designed book jackets and textiles, decorated pots, and, in the 1980s, began to create sculptures using found objects and materials.
23.
When Henrietta Angelica Garnett was 17 she married Lytton Burgo Partridge, the son of Frances Partridge, who was the sister of David Angelica Garnett's first wife.
24.
Amaryllis Angelica Garnett drowned in the Thames in 1973; she was 29.