In addition to publishing works by intellectual and literary luminaries, the Hogarth Press also commissioned and printed art work by practitioners including John Banting, Vanessa Bell, Dora Carrington, Roger Fry, Duncan Grant, and E. McKnight Kauffer, making the Press an important champion of modernist art and design as well as literature. For Woolf, the founding of the press granted her writing freedom from external editorial and commercial pressures; for Bell, who designed all of Woolf ‘s Hogarth covers, it provided an opportunity to disseminate work widely and an additional source of income. Diane F. Gillespie has shown that although “art historians judge Bell's illustrations and dust-jacket designs to be less significant than her painting and decorative art work,” the enterprise allowed the sisters to fulfil their ambition of working collaboratively forming “a nexus in the relationship between the sisters and their art media” (Gillespie 116). The press was not only culturally significant and influential, but a way for the sisters to connect their disciplines and put image and text into dialogue; and it was through a Hogarth-published dustjacket that Bell paid homage to her sister's achievements and their long-lived creative relationship after Woolf 's death.

Between April and September 2014, fresh from completing my PhD thesis “Vanessa Bell and the Significance of Form,” I had the privilege of being amongst the first scholars to access the Angelica Garnett Gift (henceforth AGG)—a bequest of over 8,000 largely unseen works by Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant. It is now housed at Charleston, Bell and Grant's former home in Sussex, situated 10 miles from Woolf ‘s Monk's House.1 AGG materials range from large-scale mural cartoons, to needlework designs, to several boxes of sketchbooks. Multiple sketches for The Death of the Moth dustjacket reside within a blue flipbook marked “VB.” By closely tracing Bell's design process and making comparisons with the finished cover, it became evident that rather than being swiftly and intuitively delivered—as has usually been accepted by scholars when discussing Bell's book jackets—this cover was carefully thought-out and painfully labored over.2 The many variations of the design contain symbolic imagery that reveal this work as a deeply private, yet highly visible monument to her sister's talent and their creative relationship.