Virginia Stephen and Clive Bell at Studland Beach in Dorset

Photographer unknown (possibly Vanessa Bell, 1879–1961)

Virginia Stephen and Clive Bell at Studland Beach, Dorset

1910

In the years immediately following Vanessa and Clive Bell’s marriage, Woolf and her brother-in-law developed an intimate relationship: intellectual, flirtatious, intense, and jovial. Erotic but not physical, it was the only relationship Clive Bell had in which he played “second fiddle,” as he reported years later. He was an important early reader of Woolf’s fiction. After he commented on early drafts of what would become her first novel, The Voyage Out (1915), she wrote to him of her ambitions for the book: “I want to bring out a stir of live men and women, against a background. I think I am quite right to attempt it, but it is immensely difficult to do.”