The household Virginia Woolf grew up in contained the children of three marriages, and the top row of this diagram is the clearest way to see it. Leslie Stephen married Harriet "Minny" Thackeray, daughter of the novelist, and had Laura. Julia Jackson married Herbert Duckworth and had George, Stella and Gerald. Both were widowed young; they married each other in 1878 and had four more — Vanessa in 1879, Thoby in 1880, Virginia in 1882, Adrian in 1883. Eight children, three sets of parents, one house at 22 Hyde Park Gate. Drawn as a chain rather than a row, with Leslie between his two wives and Julia between her two husbands, it resolves without a single crossing line.
Then the deaths, which arrive in a sequence a clinician would call compounding. Julia died in 1895, when Virginia was thirteen, and precipitated her first breakdown. Stella took over the household and the mothering, married Jack Hills in April 1897 and was dead by July — a second maternal loss inside two years, and another collapse. Thoby died of typhoid in 1906, aged 26. Leslie died in 1904, having spent nine years making the house revolve around his grief; Virginia later wrote that had he lived to 96 she could not have written at all. She recorded that both George and Gerald Duckworth had abused her, George in adolescence and Gerald in early childhood, and she said so in letters, in memoir, and aloud to the Memoir Club. On this diagram those two lines are cut-offs running exactly where the family's social account said there was nothing.
What was built out of it is on the rows below. It was Vanessa's move to Gordon Square after their father's death, and Thoby's Cambridge friends at the Thursday evenings, that became the Bloomsbury Group — Clive Bell and Leonard Woolf both arrived as Thoby's friends and both married into the family. Vanessa married Clive in 1907 and lived from about 1913 with Duncan Grant on terms that accommodated his relationships with men. Virginia married Leonard in 1912; they founded the Hogarth Press together, and he managed her illness for twenty-nine years with a vigilance she experienced as both saving and confining. Vita Sackville-West appears here as an attachment rather than a union: the affair ran from 1925, the friendship long outlasted it, and "Orlando" is a novel written as her portrait.
The single most genogram-shaped fact in Bloomsbury is Angelica. Born in 1918 to Vanessa and Duncan Grant, she was raised believing Clive Bell was her father and told the truth at eighteen; she then married David Garnett, who had been Grant's lover and who had written at her birth of one day marrying her. Her memoir "Deceived with Kindness" is the reckoning. A genogram draws descent and social parentage as different lines, which is the only reason this can be shown rather than explained — and it is drawn that way here.
Two endings sit at the edges of the diagram. Julian Bell went to Spain as an ambulance driver against his mother's wishes and was killed at Brunete in 1937, aged 29; Virginia's care of Vanessa through that year is among the last things she did well. In March 1941 Virginia walked into the River Ouse, having addressed her last letter to Leonard. Quentin Bell, Vanessa's surviving son, wrote the 1972 biography that reopened the whole subject — the family producing, in the end, its own best reader.
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