The Legend of Bloomsbury

Isabelle Stuart examines Megan Hunter’s new novel, “Days of Light.”

By Isabelle StuartJune 10, 2025

• Fiction

THERE IS AN early sketch for Vanessa Bell’s painting The Memoir Club (ca. 1943) that shows her famous friends loosely grouped together at the center of a cool-toned room. The bright blocks of color, the easy intimacy of body language, and the watchful portraits of the group’s deceased members—all are recognizable from the finished work, though the sketched figures’ faces remain blank dabs of paint. In both versions, those faces are tilted in toward each other, apparently uninterested in the viewer’s gaze.

In the sketch, the pale figure of Bell’s daughter, Angelica, peeks out at the group from behind an olive green curtain at the back of the room. The Memoir Club was founded in 1920, 15 years after the Bloomsbury circle was established, as a space for its members to rehearse the autobiographies they always meant to write. A year before the sketch was made, Angelica estranged herself from her family by marrying a man too caught up in her parents’ tangled relationships for them to tolerate.

In the finished painting, however, Angelica is gone. The same green curtain is tugged over the space where she stood, though her husband, David “Bunny” Garnett, remains near the center of the painted group. It is that half-hidden figure, childish even in her mid-twenties, that Megan Hunter makes the focus of her third novel, Days of Light.

At first, the book plays to the familiar Bloomsbury myth, the early pages of which were written by the figures at the center of Bell’s painting. Days of Light’s opening chapter brims with sprawling sunlit gardens, painted furniture, and bohemian family meals stretching late into the night. Hunter chooses Angelica’s sideways view for her main character, Ivy, who quickly sees through these quaint details. Beginning on Easter Sunday 1938, the novel follows Ivy through six more April days scattered unevenly across six decades. Each day offers a vignette of a life very different from the one that came before. The outlines are recognizable, but as soon as we think we know what will happen, Hunter strikes out in a fresh direction, opening out another range of possibilities.

Ironically, it is in these departures from fact that Hunter draws closest to the novel’s Bloomsbury roots. In an essay on biography, Virginia Woolf values the form for its ability to provide the spark for fiction (an invitation that the many novelists of her own life have found irresistible ever since). The swerves in Days of Light between historical fact and realist fiction resonate with Woolf’s own sense, learned from her friend, the biographer Lytton Strachey, that “the life which is increasingly real to us is the fictitious life.”

Fiction appeals through its illusion of lives other than our own: like her predecessors, Ivy suggests that the problem with straightforward biography arises when it implies that there is only one life to be written. When we first meet Ivy on the brink of adulthood, her imagined futures spiral in a familiar adolescent haze: “Dancer, painter, singer. When she was feeling more noble: nurse, adventurer. Spy.” But 30 years later, she still believes “she had enough time left, for a whole other life.” In the event, she launches, Orlando-like, into not one but two new ways of living.

Even when the facts of a life do not change, the tastes of their audiences do, as recent additions to the Bloomsbury canon like Harriet Baker’s Rural Hours: The Country Lives of Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Townsend Warner and Rosamond Lehmann (2024) or Francesca Wade’s Square Haunting: Five Writers in London Between the Wars (2020) make clear. Those biographies return attention to the strands of Bloomsbury lives that have faded from view over the intervening years but feel newly urgent. Hunter’s first two novels take up similarly contemporary themes: her first, The End We Start From (2017), was a fragmentary story of climate apocalypse told from the point of view of a new mother, while the second, The Harpy (2020), takes an ordinary family home as the setting for an act of violent female revenge.

Days of Light bears the impressions of these concerns, though in almost unrecognizable form. The novel was inspired by a nocturnal walk in the gardens at Charleston, the Bells’ country house (now open to the public, featuring a gift shop stocked with Omega fabrics and $40 ceramic espresso cups). The novel opens in a thinly disguised version of the house, and much of it plays out around its gardens. A nearby river becomes a character as mysterious and important as any of the others. The narrative rarely strays from Ivy’s point of view, and her childhood feeling of “the world of objects,” sometimes the facade of something deeper and other times all there is, shows how she feels herself fold in and out of her setting as the novel proceeds. The natural world feels reciprocally alive: Hunter devotes pages to the shifting shades of the sky, the smell of the Sussex air, and the postimpressionist blaze of the stars.

Often, nature feels so attractive because it offers a way out of the stifling social roles that Ivy feels pressed into, as a child, as a woman, and then, quickly, as a wife and mother. Her youthful formlessness puts her at odds with a milieu where everyone has a defined and determined artistic purpose. Her future husband’s view of her as placidly unassuming feels incorrect, “like forcing the wrong piece of a jigsaw into a space.” Her sense of jarring with her surroundings is amplified by the celebrated Bloomsbury atmosphere of acceptance: Hunter’s phrase calls to mind C. L. R. James’s reflection, when he arrived in Bloomsbury, that “both by instinct and by training I belong to it and have fit into it as naturally as a pencil fits into a sharpener.” A Trinidadian writer, James knew what it felt like to stand out in British society, and Ivy’s discomfort with her own place at the heart of this group pierces the illusion of community he is keen to sustain.

The drudgery of domestic life during the war, much of which is invisibly assigned to the servants in Bloomsbury’s own accounts, looms large here. Ivy’s attempts to divert her attention to intellectual pursuits are relentlessly foiled by her small daughters, thoughts of divinity interrupted by the washing-up. But more familiar domestic tensions, such as those between Ivy’s mother Marina and Ivy’s novelist aunt Genevieve, modeled on Woolf, are often better expressed by the figures they are based on. After seeing a show of Vanessa’s paintings in 1926, the real-life Virginia wrote to her sister: “I am amazed, a little alarmed (for as you have the children, the fame by rights belongs to me) by your combination of pure artistic vision and brilliance of imagination.” In Hunter’s telling, it is Marina who minds: “No children, she had heard Marina say, almost spitting the words. All the time in the world. And Hector waiting on her every bloody need.” In the retelling, both the irony and the generosity of Woolf’s response are elided: the sisters end up as the flat caricatures she pokes fun at in her parenthetical aside.

What does become uncomfortably vivid in Hunter’s hands is the sinisterness of Ivy’s marriage to the decades-older Bear, one of the few acknowledged scandals that shadowed Charleston. Angelica Bell was mostly unaware of Bunny’s relationship with the man she, as a teenager, had only recently learned was her father, the painter Duncan Grant; likewise, Ivy drifts unknowingly into marriage with Bear. Bear reads her teenage fickleness as an ease of being in the world that she does not feel, and the scenes of their affair are interspersed with her childhood memories and overwhelming grief, her arguments with her mother characterized by swallowed tears. When she accepts Bear’s proposal, she is flooded with relief that she will no longer have to decide on a life for herself, sneaks a glance at the “gleaming, pointed egg” of his balding head, and tries to muster a grown-up graciousness that doesn’t quite convince.

Each day in the novel is closely followed, but the years that pass between them distance Ivy from the reader throughout, and the opening of each vignette is hard to predict from the closure of the last. The single-day structure is partly a tribute to Woolf’s own famous one-day novel, Mrs. Dalloway, published 100 years ago this spring. But Hunter attempts to pair the intimacy of a day lived alongside a character with the span of some of Woolf’s more experimental works, such as her remarkable late novel The Waves (1931), which follows the stories of six friends from childhood to death. The graft means holding detail and distance in balance, a balance that gradually tips as the book goes on.

The Waves succeeds because its insights are fleeting, impressionistic, and dramatic: we flit from one character’s monologue to another’s at high speed. More recently, Francis Spufford’s Light Perpetual (2021) played the same trick, taking in five lives in a jokey present tense that skips lightly across the five decades it spans. Both books spread themselves more evenly than Days of Light. Inertia starts to accumulate during Hunter’s daylong episodes of slow-motion realism, an inertia that tugs at the reader as the narrative makes its sporadic jumps in time. In places, it is hard not to suspect Days of Light of trying to have it both ways—the pleasures of realism alongside the thrill of experiment. At the same time, a more satisfying narrative might have capitulated to the palatable tweeness of the Charleston gift shop vision of the group. At the very least, the structure allows Hunter to stay true to Bloomsbury’s insistence that conventional realist narrative is not all there is to a life.

Hunter was a poet before she turned to fiction, and the language of Days of Light is richer and denser than that of her angular first two novels. Some of this richness seems to owe its origins directly to that poetic heritage: her expectation that being a mother would bring “solidity, […] a sense of being a wall that someone could lean against,” recalls Sylvia Plath’s ambivalent tributes to motherhood. Other formulations seep in from the writers she orbits in the book: Bear’s “tanned fingers covered in hair” evoke the repulsion of the arms T. S. Eliot’s Prufrock spies “in the lamplight, downed with light brown hair.” But most of the stylistic richness is peculiarly her own: the look of “gentle, mottled sympathy” on the face of Ivy’s father, the “throw of the sky behind the buildings,” a gathered handful of Easter daffodils allowing Ivy to feel “the break of their fluted throats in her fingers.”

A lot happens amid these poetic forays. Sometimes the descriptive density feels out of balance with both the relative brevity of the book and the amount of action it contains. But few writers have spanned climate dystopia, surreal domestic drama, and now historical fiction, let alone without a pang of recalibration. That this pang is so slight is a testament to Hunter’s skill.

The legend of Bloomsbury already has many volumes, and in some ways Hunter’s eclectic past as a writer makes her a strange choice for the latest contribution. Longer and richer than her previous writing, Days of Light’s seemingly straightforward historical fiction omits the narrative charge of her earlier works. But another writer might not have pitted biography’s allegiance to realism against the possibility of the dystopian as Hunter does. She includes flickers of the surreal: a fleeting projection of Charleston subsiding beneath the waves and the strange, unexplained lights in the sky that relate to the submerged mystery at the book’s heart. These hints at other stories speak to Hunter’s versatility as a writer, but they also suggest her grasp of something fundamental about the Bloomsbury myth. Beyond the prints and the gardens, its draw has always been its members’ flair for self-fictionalization, for exploring the many stories any life can contain.