The Charleston Bulletin

Julian and Quentin Bell with their half-sister Angelica

Virginia Woolf's sister, painter and interior designer Vanessa Bell, had two children from her marriage to Clive Bell - Quentin and Julian. The family was, you might say, slightly unconventional. Vanessa and Clive had an open-relationship, with Vanessa having affairs with the likes of critic Roger Fry and artists Duncan Grant (with whom she had a third child, Angelica). Their family home, Charleston, was painted all over - including the furniture, by the artists that lived there and became a countryside retreat for much of the Bloomsbury Group, including EM Forster, John Maynard Keynes and Virginia Woolf herself.

Growing up in such a household, it probably isn't surprising that Julian and Quentin developed a creative streak.

Perhaps inspired by their mother and aunt's own childhood publication, the Hyde Park Gate News, Julian and Quentin put together a family newspaper, The Charleston Bulletin, during the summer of 1923 when they were 15 and 13 respectively. Rather sensibly Quentin concluded that 'it seemed stupid to have a real author so close at hand and not have her contribute' and so they employed the literary talents of their aunt Virginia.

The British Library are to publish these Charleston Bulletin supplements for the first time this June and they show a very different side to the perhaps unfairly pigeon-holed Virginia Woolf. The supplements document the adventures of the Woolf-Bell family coloured by Woolf's humour and wit and are accompanied by Quentin's illustrations.

Filled with family in-jokes, from light-hearted digs at the boys' father and Woolf's brother-in-law, Clive Bell, to the culinary disasters of the household cook, the supplements promise to offer their readers an insight into the life and times of the family from a refreshingly more informal, fun and personal perspective that we are perhaps not used to when learning about Woolf, who famously committed suicide in 1941. Sadly Julian too died prematurely at just 29 in the Spanish Civil War.

The supplements, as I said, will be published later this year and the unusual house and gardens of Charleston are available to visit (they are currently closed I believe, but will reopen next month).

The Hyde Park Gate News

Other posts on Virginia Woolf:

Introducing... Virginia Woolf

Book vs. Film: The Hours

The Rest is Noise