Welcome to my website.
This is where you can find out about me, about the books I write, about my work for Charleston, and about how to contact me.
My next book, ALL THE RAGE: Pleasure, Pain, Power - Stories from the Frontline of Beauty, will be published by Virago in April 2024
The Sunday Times, The Times and the Financial Times have selected ALL THE RAGE among their best non-fiction books of 2024:
‘Virginia Nicholson is a particularly fun social historian, and now she has turned her beady eye on the history of female beauty’
Times, Sunday Times
‘In this detailed account, social historian Virginia Nicholson examines the revolution in the perceived ideal of the western woman’s body that played out in the century between the crinoline and the bikini.’
Financial Times
- ENDORSEMENTS -
‘Virginia Nicholson is one of the great social historians of our time. No one else makes history this fun.’
Amanda Foreman, author of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire
‘Virginia Nicholson is the outstanding recorder of British lives in the twentieth century.’
Carmen Callil
•
I’ve now written six books of social history. The most recent, How Was it for You? Women, Sex, Love and Power in the 1960s, was published in March 2019.
In The Times, Ysenda Maxtone Graham gave the book a superlative review, describing it as “sparklingly readable”, and ‘[a] magisterial and sensuous overview of the decade”, while Rosie Boycott wrote in the Financial Times: “The stories are terrific”, and Daisy Goodwin’s Sunday Times review described it as a “sparkling survey…” featuring “a wonderfully diverse range of voices… Reading this book made me grateful for how far we had come.”
Its subject matter picks up where Perfect Wives in Ideal Homes - The Story of Women in the 1950s left off, and exposes the new battleground for women as the sexual revolution kicks in.
.
In June 2023 Granta republished the five volumes of The Diary of Virginia Woolf, edited by my mother, Anne Olivier Bell. This new, complete edition included newly commissioned Introductions, and I was delighted to contribute the first of these, for Volume 1.
•
In June 2019 I was honoured and delighted to be elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. The citation quoted Carmen Callil: “Virginia Nicholson is the outstanding recorder of British lives in the twentieth century.”
•
As President of the Charleston Trust, I work - when not researching or writing - to support Charleston, the one-time home of my grandmother the painter Vanessa Bell and other members of the Bloomsbury group, which is now an internationally-renowned museum.
My background is in TV documentaries; I’ve written newspaper features and book reviews, and I also give talks. In the last few years I’ve appeared at the Hay-on-Wye, Cheltenham, Bath, Oxford, Dartington, Ilkley and Charleston Literary Festivals (to name just a few).