Anne Olivier Bell
Historian of the Bloomsbury Group who edited the five-volume edition of Virginia Woolf ’s diaries
ANNE OLIVIER BELL, who has died aged 102, was an art historian who married Virginia Woolf ’s nephew and biographer, Quentin Bell, and became uniquely expert in the history of the Bloomsbury Group. A woman of great warmth, unquenchable optimism and robust humour who combined brisk practicality with meticulous scholarly rigour, she was sceptical of the cult which posthumously grew up around Bloomsbury, but was equally determined that its thoughts, writings and activities should be properly recorded and respected.
Her most celebrated achievement in this field was an immaculately annotated five-volume edition of Virginia Woolf ’s diaries, but she was equally proud of a project to which she devoted much of the latter part of her life, the restoration of Charleston, the handsome farmhouse on the South Downs once inhabited by Vanessa and Clive Bell and Duncan Grant, sometimes referred to as Bloomsburyon-sea.
By chance, Bloomsbury was the part of London in which she was born on 20 June 1916, the daughter of the Renaissance art historian and Keeper of Prints and Drawings at the British Museum, A E Popham, and his wife Brynhild Olivier, a member of the pre-war Neo-pagan circle graced by Rupert Brooke.
When her schoolgirl ambition to become an actress fizzled out, she entered the Courtauld Institute of Art, where she studied under Anthony Blunt, among others. A close relationship with the Euston Road painter Graham Bell (no relation to the Bloomsbury Bells) developed – Bell’s attractive portrait of her is in the Tate, and it was he who rechristened her with her mother’s surname (pronounced Olivia), by which she was commonly known thereafter.
During the war, she worked alongside Laurie Lee in the Ministry of Information, before joining the Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives Program, a Us-led initiative to locate and return cultural treasures looted by the Nazis. In 2007, her contribution to this complex task was formally honoured at a ceremony by the then US Ambassador, Robert Tuttle.
In 1946, while living in a flat next door to George Orwell, she joined the art department of the newly formed Arts Council, where she continued her work on postwar restitutions as well as planning for the Festival of Britain. In 1950, through her friendship with Roger Fry’s mistress Helen Anrep, she met the painter Vanessa Bell, Virginia Woolf ’s sister. Vanessa Bell was charmed, and invited her to Charleston to sit for a portrait.
There she encountered surviving members of Bloomsbury, whom she had previously only glimpsed at parties. “I was absolutely terrified,” she later recalled. “I don’t remember saying anything at all, but I thought they were wonderful.”
In 1952 she married Vanessa and Clive Bell’s art historian son, Quentin. Following periods in Newcastle and Leeds, the couple settled with their three children back near Charleston in 1967, when Quentin Bell was appointed Professor of the History and Theory of Art at the new University of Sussex.
A fine cook, carpenter and dressmaker, she relished her domestic and motherly roles, and never craved the academic limelight. But when Leonard Woolf authorised Quentin Bell to write the biography of Virginia Woolf, she was ready to bring her training and experience to bear and became her husband’s chief researcher, charged with the daunting task of bringing order to the unsorted mass of papers and letters for which Leonard Woolf was custodian.
Eventually she created a remarkable archive, centred on a massively cross-referenced card index which later became the basis for her magnificent edition of Virginia Woolf ’s diaries, published by the Hogarth Press between 1977 and 1984. Her assistant, Andrew Mcneillie, has vividly described her phenomenal powers of concentration and memory, as well as her adamant insistence on the watchwords of Accuracy, Concision, Interest and Relevance. “I hadn’t a scrap of imagination,” she once explained, “but I was very good at getting the facts absolutely right.” Woe betide anyone who did not.
So high were her standards that she otherwise published very little – the pamphlet Editing Virginia Woolf ’s Diary, which appeared in 1989, is her most substantial essay. However, her impeccable scholarship was recognised by the Universities of Sussex and York, both of which awarded her honorary doctorates.
After Leonard Woolf died in 1967, Monk’s House, his home near Charleston, needed methodical but sensitive clearing, a formidable task to which Anne Olivier Bell’s organisational talents were perfectly suited. Subsequently, however, Monk’s House was bought by the University of Sussex, who proceeded to manage it incompetently, much to her annoyance (it was later acquired by the National Trust). This bitter episode made the Bells all the more determined that the same fate should not befall Charleston following the death of its last surviving inhabitant, Duncan Grant, in 1978.
In collaboration with Deborah Gage – a cousin to Lord Gage, who owned the estate on which Charleston sat – a trust was formed to save the house and its rich art collection, as well as its unique interior decoration, mostly executed by Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant themselves.
Although it had fallen into terrible disrepair, Anne Olivier Bell’s intimate knowledge and long memory of the house, its contents and the lifestyle of the inhabitants, informed a remarkable and imaginative restoration project. That the Charleston Trust remains a thriving concern, open to the public and home to a variety of literary and artistic activities, owes much to her expertise and commitment.
Her happy marriage to Quentin Bell continued until his death in 1996. Despite considerable debility, Anne Olivier Bell went on to enjoy a vigorous and sociable old age, answering Bloomsbury-related queries from all over the world and maintaining her involvement with Charleston.
She is survived by her three children, who in different ways keep up the best Bloomsbury traditions; the art historian Julian Bell, the social historian Virginia Nicholson and the textile designer Cressida Bell.