BBC drama charts lives and loves of the Bloomsbury set

The BBC is to explore the lives and loves of Virginia Woolf and her sister, Vanessa Bell, in a drama about the Bloomsbury set.

Life in Squares is billed as an “intimate and emotional” drama spanning the first half of the 20th century.

Lydia Leonard and Phoebe Fox play Woolf and Bell in their younger years, as they escape the shackles of their Victorian upbringing and become founder members of the group of writers, artists and thinkers known as the Bloomsbury group.

The three-part BBC Two drama takes its title from the famous quote attributed to Dorothy Parker, that the Bloomsbury group “lived in squares, painted in circles and loved in triangles”.

^{29 Fitzroy Square in Bloomsbury, the former home of Virginia Woolf (Alamy)}

Bell’s complex romantic life will be at the heart of the piece. She was married to the art critic Clive Bell but both were at liberty to have other relationships.

She had a child with Duncan Grant, the painter, while he also conducted love affairs with Lytton Strachey and John Maynard Keynes. Grant is played in the drama by James Norton, the actor last seen playing the villain in the bleak police drama Happy Valley.

Rupert Penry-Jones and Jack Davenport also feature in the cast.

In later episodes, the sisters are played by Catherine McCormack and Eve Best. The drama will chart Woolf’s struggles with depression, which ended in her suicide in 1941, aged 59.

The programme-makers were granted permission to film at Charleston, Bell’s East Sussex home, which became a country meeting place for the group.

The drama is being produced by Ecosse Films. Lucy Bedford, executive producer, said: “Life in Squares gets under the skin of the Bloomsbury group to lay bare the very human and emotional story of a group of people determined to find their own path in life.

“At heart, Life in Squares is about family: about the families we try to escape, the ones we end up creating and the different kinds of damage love can do.”