Earlier this month I visited the Gobelins in Paris, where tapestries and carpets are still made by hand using techniques that have hardly changed over centuries. After the history-for-tourists preamble by our guide we were taken on a tour of the workshops. There was something mesmeric about the row of weavers working with only the simplest of tools: a shuttle to pass the thread back and forth, a comb to press the threads flat, a pair of scissors. One of their more surprising tools was a mirror. The tapestries are woven back to front and the mirrors are inserted under the frame so the weaver can see the image they are creating.

Another surprise was the contemporary design of the tapestries and carpets. The Gobelins do not replicate historical artefacts but produce new work based on pictures and photographs by contemporary artists. The resultant pieces are extraordinary: richly textured, they arrest the eye. Some use hundreds of colours. I saw one weaver working on a detail using perhaps a dozen different shades of purple – every possible variation from aubergine to plum. Nothing made at the Gobelins is for sale. Once the tapestries and carpets are finished they are taken to a central store, where they wait to be assigned to a public building.

Watching the weavers clock-off at 4.30 – they weave in natural light if at all possible – made me think about the rhythm of their work. Our guide had told us that in the case of complex designs a skilled weaver might only produce a few centimetres a day – a statistic I find profoundly reassuring when I compare it to my own efforts to inch my current novel forwards. Perhaps if – like the weavers – I keep weaving away at my words, the moment will come when I’ll turn the whole thing over and a marvellous picture will emerge.

There’s an interesting debate going on in British universities at the moment about the teaching of creative writing. Some argue it can’t be taught – that the best writing derives from a slow process of trial and error conducted alone at one’s desk. Others point out it involves a good deal of craft and insist that just as a painter learns perspective – or a composer scoring for different instruments – so a poet must study metre and a novelist plot.

There is disagreement even among those in favour as to the form such teaching should take. Broadly speaking, the dispute falls into two camps: those who advocate skills-based classes (such as scrutinizing different plot-lines) versus those who champion the workshop (where participants take it in turns to read their work aloud and are given feedback by the group). Both clearly bring benefits. Skills-based sessions offer insight into the technical aspects of writing and often help prepare the writer for the harsh realities of the marketplace. Workshops encourage critical self-appraisal through a tough kind of love.

Each model has detractors. Workshopping (now a verb) can damage as well as build confidence, and can mean a piece of writing is dissected by others before it has acquired its own identity.  At its worst, technical courses produce formulaic writing which leaves most industry professionals running for the cover of their slush-piles.

So far, most UK university undergraduate and masters programmes have privileged the workshop over skills-based classes, supplemented with plenty of individual tuition from published writers. Those – like the recent masters at Napier (which foregrounds technique and specifically orients its students towards genres of writing) – remain rare.

But what about the newest and most controversial university course in creative writing:  the Ph D? This has taken a while to establish itself in the face of fierce opposition from those who contend creative writing doesn’t belong in the academy at all. And as with undergraduate and masters programmes, even those institutions who now offer the degree have conflicting views as to how it should be assessed. Some require a finished piece of writing – a whole novel, a full collection of poems – reasoning that it’s impossible to judge part of a work. Others propound the Ph. D. has an obligation to include critical analysis, and consequently insist on a sample piece of creative work together with a commentary. The critical component can be as little as 10%, or – as in the case of the University St Andrews where I teach – as high as 50%.

Few of today’s literary giants began with a qualification in creative writing, though there are plenty of stories of writers enrolling for degrees and writing instead (Ian Rankin, for one, has famously described how he used his Ph. D. funding to kick-start his career as a novelist). So is the debate about the precise form creative writing courses should take beside the point? Maybe what’s important has less to do with acquiring technique or gaining feedback from others – and more with giving participants permission to carve out time to write.

Kettles Yard was the Cambridge home of Jim Ede, a man who put a great deal of thought into his surroundings. He was passionate about art and collected paintings and sculpture – his house is full of extraordinary works by such diverse artists as Pablo Picasso, Barbara Hepworth, the Cornish painter Alfred Wallis, and Ede’s grandchildren.

Ede argued that ‘the role of a work of art is to give food for thought, to act as a stimulant to entice the onlooker to inspect things, people and emotions from a new point of view’. He challenged the lazy passivity through which we normally see the world.

Some of the most intriguing corners of Kettles Yard are not the now famous art works, but the way ordinary items such as a chair or shells collected from the beach enter into dialogue. Ede was fascinated by these ‘conversations’ as he called them, and paid careful attention to way the things in his house were arranged.

There is a low round table in the hall of Kettles Yard which has a spiral made of pebbles in the centre, and a dark glass ball to one side. The circles are beautiful, and echo and contrast with other shapes in the room.

The effect stays with me. Coming home I notice rectangles in the photographs on my windowsill, repeated in the larger rectangles of the window frame and door. I am even moved to tidy away some of my clutter so that the impact of the repeating rectangles is more pronounced.

This month took me to New York for the US launch of Vanessa and Virginia. While I was there I contributed to a round table discussion about Virginia Woolf. The other panelists included Ruth Gruber, who wrote the first Ph. D. on Virginia Woolf in the 1930s. Ruth (now 97) described tea with Virginia and Leonard Woolf in their London home one afternoon in October 1935.

Virginia, she told us, was lying on a sofa, wearing a soft grey dress, and smoking a cigarette. Her hair was cut short in a bob. She said little as Leonard attended to the courtesies of pouring and passing tea, only becoming involved in the conversation when Ruth recounted a recent visit to Germany. The tea ended civilly, and was followed by a brief – and polite – exchange of letters.

Years later, Ruth read an account of herself in Virginia Woolf’s published correspondence, a puzzling, unflattering report, which did not correspond to her memory of their meeting, or the tone of the letters they exchanged. I think everyone listening to Ruth felt outraged on her behalf at this apparent betrayal.

Most of us won’t ever see our private thoughts published. If we did, we might have to reflect further on the disjunction between what we say and do in public, and the way we behave when the world isn’t looking. We like to assume we are straightforward, uncomplicated beings who rarely change our minds or contradict ourselves, yet a moment’s honest self-scrutiny reveals just the opposite.

Woolf herself was aware of the dichotomy. ‘We’re splinters & mosaics; not, as they used to hold, immaculate, monolithic, consistent wholes’, she wrote in her diary. She went on to imagine a form of writing that might encompass these ‘human dimensions’.

Perhaps, if we had more of the kind of writing Woolf envisaged, instead of the self-congratulatory memoirs tending to fill bookstores today, we might find it easier to accept that our icons also have feet of clay.

I first read Juliet Mitchell in the early 1980s alongside other feminist writers such as Germaine Greer, Kate Millett and Alice Walker. I can still recall the growing sense of entitlement their work gave me: to choose what kind of relationships I wanted to be involved in, what work I wanted to do.

Earlier this month I attended a one-day symposium in Cambridge to mark Juliet’s retirement from academic life. The morning began with a film clip of Juliet from the 1970s, arguing with passionate earnestness for some of the principles we take for granted today (the absurdity of women agreeing to ‘obey’ their husbands in marriage, for example). Juliet’s more recent work has been on siblings – work I drew on for the writing of Vanessa and Virginia. For Juliet, our failure to navigate the frequently fraught relationships we have with our siblings affects the way we live as adults. She suggests it is a primary ingredient in discrimination, violence and war.

At the end of the day, Juliet responded to the different commentaries people had given on her work. Several of the things she said have stuck in my mind. A reminder of our fragility, and how the past continues to play itself out in our lives. As Juliet put it, ‘traumas continue to ghost, double, return in unpredictable but inevitable ways’. She quoted the axioms we’ve all heard: how disaster often strikes twice, or how we make the same mistake three times. All this left me thinking: how far do we co-create what happens in our lives, even apparently gratuitous events like accidents or falling ill?

A profound thank you, Juliet, for setting me on my path all those years ago, and for continuing to challenge my orientation today.

‘In short, disconnected scenes of exquisite description and nuanced emotion, Susan Sellers invites us to assemble the pieces into a picture not only of the Bloomsbury circle, but of the exigencies of creative work as outlet, devotion, and anchor. A fascinating, compelling novel written with authority and tenderness.’

Susan Vreeland, author of Girl in Hyacinth Blue.

‘Reading Vanessa and Virginia is like swimming across the seabed of the minds of sisters Woolf and Bell – everywhere there are fragments of paintings and scenes from novels and lyrical phrases scattered like sunken treasure. It is a novel both exquisite and haunting. A triumph of the imagination.’

Rebecca Stott, author of Ghostwalk.

‘Deftly, apparently effortlessly, Susan Sellers’s novel of love, art, and sexual jealousy gives us convincing and intimate access to the relationship between two remarkable sisters. At once pellucid and sophisticated, Vanessa and Virginia is quite simply a pleasure to read.’

Robert Crawford, author of Full Volume.

‘profoundly insightful… Vanessa emerges as such a vibrant, brave, complex and living woman…. the love/hate relationship between the two sisters, the strange exchange of places between them, the tenacity of their attachment to parents, brother, the passion of the affairs are convey so vividly. An extraordinary coup.’

Nicole Ward Jouve, author of Colette.

‘Vanessa and Virginia is a beautifully written novel. Vanessa’s story is formed, as one might expect of an artist-narrator, from painterly prose… Sellers achieves a believable psychological reality in the figure of Vanessa, who, as narrator, leads the reader through a series of interconnected pictures, much as the viewer wanders the corridors of an art gallery pausing from canvas to canvas…Vanessa’s memory moves across years and through moments with sensitivity and grace, so that the reader is seamlessly transported from place to place, event to event, feeling to feeling. It is a difficult structure, but Sellers successfully achieves unity in its execution…

As a Woolf scholar [Sellers] is meticulous in her attention to facts and details, but through Vanessa’s voice she reminds the reader that ‘art is not life’… Sellers does not succumb to sycophancy as both sisters’ foibles and flaws lie side by side with their genius. Her even-handed approach to their strengths and weaknesses creates a believable reality which the reader (Bloomsbury expert or not) can fully appreciate. Sellers’ command of her material, her ability to create Post-impressionist pictures with words and her mastery of the difficult pastiche form, means that her work stands as a literary success in its own right, neither overpowered nor overshadowed by the artistic achievements of her subjects.’

Elizabeth Wright, in The Virginia Woolf Bulletin.

‘I was hugely impressed by this accomplished first novel. It traces the complex artistic and emotional interweaving of the lives of sisters Vanessa Bell and Virginia Woolf. The story, told from Vanessa’s perspective, is passionate, intimate and entirely lacking pretension. The ending comes, as we know it must, with Virginia’s suicide. And yet Susan Sellers has managed to deliver the expected and for it to still shock and upset us. This is a truly great book and I hope to see more from this talented writer.’

Matthew Perren, I-On Edinburgh.

‘Vanessa and Virginia is fictional, but based on real people and events – the childhood of Vanessa and Virginia Stephen, later to be artist Vanessa Bell and novelist Virginia Woolf, and their subsequent lives up to the death of Virginia. It is from the perspective of Vanessa, and addressed to Virginia (though without expecting response). Sellers’ style is not an imitation of Woolf’s, but it has deep similarities – the same beautiful lyricism, use of abstract images, delving into human emotions with an intelligence and compassion which never stumbles into the saccharine… I was wrapped in the beauty of the language and never wanted to leave. [Sellers has written] a beautiful novel which does justice to Bell’s perspective as a very talented painter, overshadowed by a very talented novelist sister, in an unusual group and unusual time. I don’t know where Sellers can go after this, but I look forward to finding out.’

Simon Thomas. For the rest of this review, click on: ’stuck-in-a-book’ review

‘…not only have I learned something about Vanessa Bell and Virginia Woolf, but it is one of those novels that has something profound to say about human nature.’

Lisa Glass. For the rest of this review, click on: vulpes libris review

‘Vanessa and Virginia, as well as being both subtle and beautifully written, has lots of narrative drive. The descriptions of Vanessa’s paintings, the way they reflect and interact with her complex relationships, are particularly effective.’

Sarah Annes Brown, in Ariachne’s Broken Woof. For the rest of this review, click on Sarah Brown’s review of Vanessa and Virginia

‘Superb, really exceptional!’ Sally Cline, author of Zelda Fitzgerald.

‘beautifully written – vivid yet economical’ Deborah Arnander, translator

‘a very remarkable achievement – seamless play between two worlds, fact and fiction’

Andrew McNeillie, editor of Virginia Woolf’s diaries and essays.

‘rich and economic – packed with concentrated language

which I wanted to say out loud for the pleasure of it!’ Alesha Racine, poet.

‘incredibly evocative, particularly the childhood section’

Anna Snaith, author of Virginia Woolf.

‘it’s a book you read and re-read and read again for the sensual pleasure that carries you through as fast as the child [Virginia] skipping off to look up the virgin queen in her father’s library’

Angela Morgan Cutler, author of Auschwitz.

‘I was impressd by the beauty of the language, by the compression, by the way that the technique, like Cather’s “touch and pass on”, creates such a resonant text for readers even for readers who have themselves read a great deal of Woolf’.

Melba Cuddy-Keane, author of Virginia Woolf: The Intellectual and the Public Sphere.

‘boldly sustained in its central narrative device, not to mention the marvellous “painterly” detail’

Christine Crow, author of Miss X or the Wolf Woman.

In a gloomy house in Hyde Park Gate, two young girls are raised to be perfect ladies. But from the beginning Vanessa Bell and her sister Virginia Woolf pursue different dreams, and in their Bloomsbury household they create a ferment of free thinking and even freer living. Devoted to each other, yet fiercely competitive, both sisters fight to realise their artistic vision amidst a chaos of desire, scandal, illness and war.

Traced with lyrical intensity, their intertwined lives gradually reveal an underlying pattern. Only at the end of this fascinating work does the real nature of the relationship between Virginia and Vanessa become clear. Susan Sellers’ novel reveals a dramatic new interpretation of one of the most famous and iconic events in twentieth-century literature – Woolf’s suicide by drowning – as the two sisters’ life-long rivalry reaches its final crisis.

An expert on Woolf’s life and work, Susan Sellers is inspired by Woolf’s own brilliant narrative technique – a sensuous, impressionistic, interior voice – to inhabit the mind of an artist at work, and recreate the tale of two sisters as Vanessa might have told it. Vanessa and Virginia is a chronicle of love and revenge, madness, genius, and the compulsion to create beauty in the face of relentless difficulty and deep grief.

To buy a copy of Vanessa and Virginia, click on

http://www.tworavenspress.com/ (fast delivery and no p&p charge)

or you can use amazon or whsmith.

‘Vanessa and Virginia is a beautiful, haunting novel about the love, the rivalry between two gifted sisters, and the real purpose of Art. The achievement here is an uncanny, utterly persuasive empathy for both sisters, and the world and times in which they lived.’

John Burnside

‘Vanessa and Virginia is a beautiful, haunting novel about the love, the rivalry between two gifted sisters, and the real purpose of Art. The achievement here is an uncanny, utterly persuasive empathy for both sisters, and the world and times in which they lived.’ John Burnside