6/20/2023 0 Comments Impulse by Vanessa Garden![]() ![]() At the back of the house, the two sisters had a small room to themselves, where they spent some of their happiest afternoons. ![]() The tall terrace house, in a respectable upper middle class cul-de-sac, was full of ‘innumerable small oddly shaped rooms’ that could accommodate up to eighteen people, including servants. Together they had a further four children: Vanessa in 1879, Thoby in 1880, Virginia in 1882 and Adrian in 1883. They had each been widowed and brought four children to their union: George, Stella and Gerald Duckworth, and Laura Stephen, who was intellectually disabled. Three families lived here, united by the marriage in 1878 of Leslie Stephen, an eminent man of letters, and Julia Duckworth, a Pre-Raphaelite model and philanthropist. In adolescence, as part of a busy, increasingly male-dominated family, they formed a nucleus, ‘a small world inside the big world’, fostering their creative inspiration and the mutual love that would sustain them for the rest of their lives. The sisters’ early years were largely happy but later were touched by tragedy and grew troubled. The house at 22 Hyde Park Gate Kensington, was the childhood home of the remarkable Stephen sisters, the painter Vanessa (later Bell) and the writer Virginia (later Woolf) who became important figures in England’s Bloomsbury Group, an influential circle of writers, artists and intellectuals at the start of the 20 th century. ![]()
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