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Deceived With Kindness
Deceived With Kindness
Oct 30, 2024 7:25 PM

Author:Angelica Garnett

Deceived With Kindness

Angelica Garnett may truly be called a child of Bloomsbury. Her Aunt was Virginia Woolf, her mother Vanessa Bell, and her father Duncan Grant, though for many years Angelica believed herself, naturally enough, the daughter of Vanessa's husband Clive.

Her childhood homes, Charleston in Sussex and Gordon Square in London, were both centres of Bloomsbury activity, and she grew up surrounded by the most talked-about writers and artists of the day - Leonard and Virginia Woolf, Roger Fry, the Stracheys, Maynard Keynes, David Garnett (whom she later married), and many others.

But Deceived with Kindness is also a record of a young girl's particular struggle to achieve independence from that extraordinary and intense milieu as a mature and independent woman. With an honesty that is by degrees agonising and uplifting, the author creates a vibrant, poignant picture of her mother, Vanessa Bell, of her own emergent individuality, and of the Bloomsbury era.

Reviews

Passionate, lucid, risky, rash, hard to put down and impossible to forget

—— Hilary Spurling , Observer

Beautifully written and admirably honest... Refreshing and surprising

—— Fiona MacCarthy , The Times

Kretser's native style is clear, vigorous, sensitive to mood and cadence, and strongly narrative

—— Ursula Le Guin , Guardian

De Kretser is an elegant and accomplished storyteller

—— Daily Telegraph

A meticulously researched work of scholarship, but is also a delightfully personal account of Dalby's year among the geisha. Geisha remains [Dalby's] best-known work and is the bible of geisha studies to this day

—— Times Literary Supplement

Popular history in the best sense...its attention to human detail and its commanding prose call to mind the best work of Barbara Tuchman

—— Washington Post
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