Thoby Stephen, Clive Bell's best friend at Trinity College, Cambridge, kept photographs on his mantelpiece of his beautiful sisters, Virginia and Vanessa. When they attended the May Ball in 1900, the sisters would have had the opportunity to meet the friend whom their brother had described to Virginia as ‘a sort of mixture between Shelley and a sporting country squire’ (Hussey 9). Two years later, Thoby invited Clive to visit his family in the New Forest, where the Stephens had rented a house. Soon afterwards, Clive visited the sisters at their home on Hyde Park Gate in London, and when the siblings travelled in Europe in 1904 it was natural that they stopped in Paris on their way home so that Thoby could see his friend Clive, who was living there.

Clive and Virginia shared the agony of watching Thoby die after his doctors had misdiagnosed as malaria the typhoid he had contracted in Greece in 1906. Vanessa, who by then had twice rejected Clive's marriage proposals, lay ill in the Stephens’ house at Gordon Square, suffering from the same disease that killed her brother. To Virginia's amazement, her sister agreed to marry Clive on the day their brother was interred. She experienced the marriage – which necessitated her and her younger brother, Adrian, looking for a new home – as a second bereavement. Her relations with Clive would never be straightforward, refracted as they were through her intense intimacy with her sister: he was both conduit and threat to that relationship.

For his part, Clive was as smitten with Virginia as he was with Vanessa. When she shared with him the early drafts of her first novel – called ‘Melymbrosia’ at the time – he was both flattered and awestruck, and gave her honest critique. When the Bells’ first child, Julian, was born, Clive and Virginia embarked on a flirtation that caused deep pain to Vanessa. When Virginia was courted by Leonard Woolf, Clive's jealousy gave rise to bitter recriminations in letters to his friends. But Clive and Virginia remained always close, a closeness that sometimes led to exasperation, irritation and malice. They both loved gossip; they were both deeply pacifist; they shared the pain of Thoby's death.