The lives of Virginia Woolf and her sister, Vanessa Bell embodied opposites of human nature. The former was dedicated to the life of the mind and imagination, the latter to sensuous and sensual experience. This book shows how the two sisters developed and enriched each other's lives. The two sisters' childhood was blighted by tragedy and trauma and their early lives were subject to the frustrations that were common to the women of Victorian and Edwardian England. Dunn argues that their subsequent successes as writer and artist owed much to this mutual enrichment. Jane Dunn is also the author of Moon in Eclipse: A Life of Mary Shelley.