Lot 52
Bell, Julian (1908-1937)
Autograph letter signed to F. L. Lucas
Auction: 16 June 2026 from 10:00 BST
Description
Charleston, c.1930. 2 leaves, 22.5 x 17.5cm, each written on both sides, signed 'Julian', old folds
Provenance
By direct descent from F. L. Lucas.
Footnote
A rare autograph letter by the ill-fated son of Clive and Vanessa Bell, at once confiding and confident, providing F. L. Lucas, the elder Apostle and de facto representative of the Bloomsbury group in Cambridge, with a wide-ranging dispatch on his own literary efforts, as well as his and his father's private lives. Discussing his relationship with Helen, that is, Helen Souter (later Morris), the Cambridge undergraduate with whom he conducted a two-year affair in the early 1930s, Julian remarks that she ‘almost had a nervous breakdown as a result of the life she had been leading during the last week of term’. He also discusses the loss of his notes on Pope, his struggle to write a play ('Helen poured on cold water with a vengeance'), a forthcoming Cambridge anthology from the Hogarth Press, and Clive's affair with Benita Jaeger ('certainly very pretty, tho' not at all the kind of appearance I like') and his thwarted attempt at income tax evasion. Julian was later to die of wounds received while volunteering as an ambulance driver in the Spanish Civil War, Lucas writing an obituary for King's College 'meant as an act of defiance to the nationalist sympathisers and appeasers who argued against Britain's involvement in continental wars' (Jones, ‘Carrington (And Woolf) in Cambridge', Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society, Vol. 13, No. 3 (2006), pp. 301-334).