magiadoreal

Rarely do you encounter a woman who commands as much admiration as does the painter Vanessa Bell in Priya Parmar’s multilayered, subtly shaded novel, “Vanessa and Her Sister.” The sister of the title is, of course, Virginia Woolf, who understood how hard it is for a novelist to capture a character. “Few catch the phantom,” Woolf said in a lecture at Cambridge in 1924, the year before the publication of “Mrs. Dalloway.” “Most have to be content with a scrap of her dress or a wisp of her hair.” Parmar’s portrait brings Vanessa out of the shadows, into fully realized, shining visibility. The world remembers Virginia better than her enigmatic older sister: Parmar restores the symmetry of their relationship in the familial landscape, showing how essential Vanessa’s steadying force was to Virginia’s precarious balance. Though Vanessa was only two and a half years older than Virginia, she took on a maternal role for her and their two brothers in 1895, after their mother’s death, when...