EDITED DIARIES OF VIRGINIA WOOLF
ANNE OLIVIER BELL 1916 – 2018
Anne Olivier Bell, who edited the diaries of Virginia Woolf into five landmark volumes and was a rare surviving link to the Bloomsbury Group, the coterie of English artists and intellectuals prominent in the first half of the last century, died July 18 at her home in England. She was 102.
Her daughter Cressida Bell confirmed her death.
Anne Bell was also thought to be among the last members of the so-called Monuments Men, a unit that worked to protect and recover artworks during and after the Second World War. One of the many famous people with whom she rubbed elbows during her long life was George Clooney, who directed and starred in a 2014 movie about that unit. In a 2017 interview with The Scottish Daily Mail, she described meeting him at the film’s première.
“I said to him, ‘I’m very pleased indeed to see you, but I must confess, I don’t really know who you are,’ ” she said.
She was interviewed often late in life, and self-deprecation toward having been a part of so much history was generally her attitude.
“I haven’t any imagination,” she told The Telegraph in 2014. “But I was lucky to spend my life among fascinating people.”
Anne Olivier Popham was born on June 20, 1916, in London. Her father, A.E. Popham, was an authority on Italian drawings and keeper of prints and drawings at the British Museum. Her mother, Brynhild (Olivier) Popham was a cousin of the actor Laurence Olivier.
She attended St. Paul’s Girls School, then studied art history at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London. She had a relationship with artist Graham Bell, whose Miss Anne Popham (1937-38) is a portrait of her. They planned to marry, but when war came he enlisted in the RAF and was killed in 1943.
During the war Bell was a research assistant at the Ministry of Information, and in 1945 was recruited to join the Monuments Men — the Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives Section — which had been created in 1943 and was still at work.
She was sent to the British zone of occupied Germany, where she co-ordinated the activities of officers in the field, who were trying to repair damaged churches and other things of architectural or artistic significance.
She returned to England in 1947. While working at the Arts Council of Britain, she met artist Vanessa Bell (no relation to Graham), a sister of Virginia Woolf. The sisters were central members of the Bloomsbury Group (named after a London district), along with E.M. Forster, John Maynard Keynes and others.
Quentin Bell, a son of Vanessa and Clive Bell, began courting her. They married in 1952. “I was 36 and thought I’d never meet anyone to love again,” she said years later, “so I was rather pleased.”
She assisted her husband in the writing of his 1972 book about his aunt, Virginia Woolf: A Biography. Then it was her turn: In 1977 she published The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Vol. 1. She would edit four more volumes; the last was published in 1984.
“For Olivier (as she was generally known) her finest achievement was the painstaking editing of the five volumes of Virginia Woolf ’s diaries,” her daughter said by email.
Scholars and reviewers were quick to praise the diaries for illuminating a writer sometimes considered offputting. “For those who are afraid that Virginia Woolf is beyond their understanding,” Marcie Hershman wrote in the Boston Globe, “this first diary will prove a fascinating rebuttal.”
Quentin Bell died in 1996. In addition to her daughter Cressida, Anne Bell is survived by another daughter, Virginia Nicholson; a son, Julian Bell; six grandchildren; and five great-grandchildren.
Bell was conscious of how time can cause matters once familiar to become obscure. In the 1980s she helped found the Charleston Trust, dedicated to preserving a farmhouse associated with the Bloomsbury Group. In Volume 1 of the diaries, she talked about wanting to commit her knowledge to paper before it was gone.
“There is not likely to be another edition of these diaries for perhaps half a century,” she wrote. “In that time much pertinent information that I have acquired from within the circle of family and friends will have vanished for ever unless it be recorded now.
“Moreover, the obstacles and obscurities born of time and distance will become increasingly impenetrable; names that are household words to some may become — may already be — Greek to others. When Virginia Woolf wonders whether to stretch out her hand for Rob Roy or says she saw a painted lady near Glynde, can we be sure that she will be understood?”