They ate garlic and didn't always bathe; they listened to Wagner and worshiped Diaghilev; they sent their children to coeducational schools, explored homosexuality and free love, vegetarianism and Post-impressionism. They were often drunk and broke, sometimes hungry, but they were of a rebellious spirit. Inhabiting the same England with Philistines and Puritans, this parallel minority of moral pioneers lived in a world of faulty fireplaces, bounced checks, blocked drains, whooping cough, and incontinent cats. They were the bohemians. Virginia Nicholson — the granddaughter of painter Vanessa Bell and the great-niece of Virginia Woolf — explores the subversive, eccentric, and flamboyant artistic community of the early twentieth century in this "wonderfully researched and colorful composite portrait of an enigmatic world whose members, because they lived by no rules, are difficult to characterize" (San Francisco Chronicle).

Virginia Nicholson was born in Newcastle-upon-Tyne. After studying at Cambridge University she lived in France and Italy and then worked as a documentary researcher for BBC television. Her first book, Charleston: A Bloomsbury House and Garden — written in collaboration with her father, Quentin Bell — was an account of the Sussex home of her grandmother, the painter Vanessa Bell — Virginia Woolf's sister. She is married, has three children and lives in Sussex, England.