Feeling an overwhelming sadness after reading this book. Sadness because of all these amazing artists that slipped our memory. How many more would be there if we celebrated women artists as much as we do male artists.

I didn't chime with all the author said, the conjectures she made at times felt like such leaps, and yet, I feel this overwhelming feeling of gratitude that this book exists and that those conjectures were made. I don't think it's much better for women artists now, so that leaves a lot of melancholia in me (as a female artist myself).

I enjoy how Birrell uses letters and artworks to piece together the stories of female artists in the Bloomsbury group, without resorting to a conventional chronological narrative of their lives. It’s interesting to see the range of queer relationships these artists had, and I am particularly struck by the strong emotional connection in the open relationship between Carrington and Lytton Strachey, despite them both being more physically attracted to members of their own biological sex. What I find more difficult to read are the lengthy descriptions of artworks. As someone not very accustomed to reading art criticism, I often struggled to see the connection between the artwork and the thematic/emotional interpretations Birrell draws from them.

This was an interesting book. I learned more about artists I knew a little about. I learned about artists I had never heard of, some of whom it turns out, I love. I found the premise challenging at times. I'm very interested in fresh perspectives on what has traditionally been a white, male arena and this queer reading of women artists was very welcome, but as the author herself acknowledges, the secretive nature of the women's sexuality, their effective erasing from the canon and the passage of time since their work was being made often leads to a paucity of material by which to assess the work. Some of it read rather like the yearning of the author herself rather than anything else. There was lots to commend in this book, but some areas were disappointingly thin, not through lack of work by the author herself. It speaks more of the world in which the painters themselves were operating, but it's melancholy all the same.

Women in the art world have always played second fiddle throughout the ages, despite big names like Kusama, O'Keefe and Kahlo having easily recognisable and much loved work.

Knowing right from the very cover that This Dark Country focused on women, drew me in immediately. I am slightly ashamed to say that I had never heard about any of the incredibly talented women featured in this book, but I love that Birrell not only tells of their art, but of their lives and the person behind the artwork.

What a gloriously radical approach to art criticism this book is! Birrell combines elements of group and individual biography with traditional art criticism and then tops it all with the kind of creative response that it more frequently found, I'd say, in the best literary criticism, the type that doesn't often make the crossover into the general public sphere. Birrell is deeply self-conscious, as contemporary scholars have to be, of the forces of race, gender, sexuality and social class and the ways that they inflect the lives and identities of the female artists she is writing about most of whom are white, upper middle class and privileged - and yet the picture is more complicated than that as the book goes on to show with subtlety and nuance.

I'd say this is the sort of book that may enrage anyone accustomed to 'traditional' conservative art criticism, the sort that talks blithely of 'genius' and 'masterpiece' without ever interrogating those terms. But for anyone who who enjoys the way postmodern scholarship and literature have been tearing through down the boundaries that separate 'personal writing' from criticism and even fiction, this fresh, stimulating and exciting.

This is a fascinating yet oddly frustrating piece of work. Its stated aim is, through a study of still-life painting, to recontextualise British women painters of the first half of the 20th century and to shift the spotlight from the handful of known names onto the many others that have become forgotten or marginalised through the pressures of a patriarchal society and culture. And while there’s surely no doubt that this was certainly true, I was left unsure whether Rebecca Birrell has successfully argued her case.

Part of the problem is down to approach, I think. The book is a mix of solid art criticism and biography merged with a partially autoethnographic approach and even the occasional fictocritical insert thrown in. All these separate techniques are valid and fascinating in themselves but when thrown together like this they can sometimes undermine each other. For instance, a vignette of Dora Carrington’s solitary internal monologue in her room sits rather awkwardly with more traditional analysis of letters and other primary sources. What we get rather than an objective picture of Carrington (or the other subjects) is Birrell’s more fictional reconstruction of who she wants Carrington to be. Although, you could perhaps argue that this is a pitfall of any biography and it’s just that it’s laid more bare here than in other texts. However, on the plus side, these vignettes are often brilliantly written and I could quite happily have seen more of them. It’s just that their occasional appearances tends to disrupt the momentum of any more traditionally argued critical argument.

There is also a slight issue with citation, I feel. Birrell’s bibliography is weighted pretty heavily towards the primary sources of letters, diaries and so on, rather than secondary ones. Nothing wrong with this, of course, and necessary, in fact, for Birrell’s aims of letting these individuals speaks for themselves and escape their marginalisation in the (male privileged) interpretations of this period of art history. And yet, citation seems rather spottily employed, used, for example, to corroborate uncontested and sometimes irrelevant places and dates but curiously absent when Birrell is putting forward theories and assertions that need a bit more evidence than they are given.

Birrell is obviously very keen to unite her subjects in a queer-oriented coalition of resistance but this works for some of the artists more than others, perhaps most glaring in the cases of Gwen John and Nina Hamnett, who have far more documented a heterosexual history than anything else. Not that it’s impossible (or even unlikely) that both women had bi experiences — just that there’s not much evidence for any substantial case to be put forward. For instance, Birrell asserts that John’s love for Vera Oumancoff is ‘equivalent (if not more pressing) than that which she had felt for Rodin’ [during their years-long relationship]. Again, it might well be the case but as Birrell goes on to admit that due to a lack of surviving evidence ‘the true scale of that relationship remains unclear, possibly understated.’ But couldn’t it just as easily now be being overstated by Birrell herself.

It’s not that I don’t think Birrell’s take on the period is incorrect and I spent a lot of time willing her arguments on but there were definitely points where I was left uneasy at the paucity of evidence to back up her claims. There’s no doubting her scholarship or her commitment to her ideas — just that they sometimes lack the sources to back them up. I was left unconvinced, for example, that the card game of Patience could support some of the subtextual claims Birrell wishes to make for it and would have perhaps wished for some theoretical heft to support it.

Similarly, Birrell’s laudable wish to reclaim the forgotten artists of the period leads to some rather unbalanced chapters. We get far more on the already well-documented Carrington, John, Hamnett and Vanessa Bell but far less on the likes of Ethel Sands or Winifred Gill. Part of this absence supports Birrell’s assertion of their marginalisation and I’m sure there’s a lot of truth to the idea that the careers of these women were snuffed out by chauvinism and outright male oppression by husbands, fathers etc. But I also suspect that it’s far from the whole story and a number of other factors have to be taken into consideration — economics and class, for example. Birrell pays lip service to the influence of class upon the artistic lives of these women but I feel fails to factor it into many of her later evaluations, weakening her overall argument slightly. And (once again) it leads to the likes of Virginia Woolf getting a free pass for their snobbery and sometimes outright class hatred on account of their centrality to feminist discourse of the time.

But where the book really shines is in its art criticism and its analysis of the works of the various painters involved. Birrell is a perceptive and articulate critic and her interpretations are passionate, entertaining and convincing. In an ideal world, I think I would have liked to have seen the removal of some of the bigger (crowd-pulling but already well-documented) names to give room for a deeper dive into the work of the lesser names and a wider analysis of their work.

All in all, however, This Dark Country is a good addition to the critical work on this period of British art, although perhaps not quite in the same league as Virginia Nicholson’s Among the Bohemians and other works. At times it reads like a comprehensive set of research notes for what would undoubtedly be a fantastic novel set in the period and part of me definitely hopes that this is something we might see from Birrell in the future.