Frances Spalding is an art historian with a passion for artist's stories. Her books on Roger Fry and Vanessa Bell bring to the fore two instrumental figures in Bloomsbury's rise to artistic prominence. These books, together with her biographies of poet Stevie Smith and painter John Minton, make important contributions to the history of late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century British art and poetry.

Spalding was born Frances Crabtree on 16 July 1950 in Surrey, England, the daughter of Hedley Crabtree and Margaret Holiday Crabtree. When she was quite small, her father, an aeronautical engineer, installed a child's writing desk in his study, supplying hand-sewn blank books for her to fill. By the time her father left the family, when Spalding was only six, her love of books was already well established. She joined the village library at the earliest possible age, carried home her allotted three to five books, and sometimes...