Humm, Maggie. Snapshots of Bloomsbury: The Private Lives of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2006. 226 pp.

Critical interest in the personal lives of Virginia Woolf and her sister, the painter Vanessa Bell, has increased exponentially in the last twenty years, as scholars apply newly articulated theoretical tools to map the dynamics of their position in British modernism. As daughters of historian Sir Leslie Stephen, they were raised in a stimulating, literary middle-class environment and grew into maturity and financial independence just before the Great War when their prospects for personal and creative freedom seemed limitless. They would go on to contribute significantly to modernist aesthetics while also brilliantly defining and undermining the role gender played in family, education, politics, and art. Yet Virginia would infamously claim in "A Room of One's Own" that between the vote and five hundred pounds a year, the latter was far more important, and the freethinking Vanessa would retreat for half her lifetime to the domestic sanctuary she created for herself and her blended family at Charleston Farmhouse in rural Sussex. Their modernity was decidedly of their own fashioning. Maggie Humm's book asks what their use of amateur and domestic photography reveals about how they shaped their identities and aesthetic visions. By approaching Woolf's and Bell's photo albums as vehicles and means of identity construction, she dismantles the conception of albums as insignificant domestic (feminine) productions and shows how the albums "reveal two visually creative women articulating aesthetic, familial and fraternal experiences in a range of media" (4) as they illustrate, construct, and assess their own history.