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 new book, ALL THE RAGE: Pleasure, Pain, Power - Stories from the Frontline of Beauty, was published in the UK by Virago on 11 April 2024.
Order here:
https://store.virago.co.uk/products/all-the-rage
ALL THE RAGE was published in the USA by Pegasus on 6 August 2024, and immediately gained a prominent review by Laura Jacobs in THE WALL STREET JOURNAL:
‘Beauty is a double-edged sword that cuts women every which way. Enter All the Rage by the social historian Virginia Nicholson. Ms. Nicholson divides her book into seven chapters named for the eras in her 100-year history. Brilliantly, she’s chosen a woman to symbolize each era, and begins each chapter by deconstructing a photograph of the standard-bearer: How is she dressed? What undergarments might she be wearing? What is her face saying? Her setting, her posture, her position? The analysis is intimate. Balancing wide-ranging research with lively storytelling, Ms. Nicholson doesn’t merely humanize history, she makes it fun.’
SUNDAY TIMES BOOK OF THE WEEK - 31 March 2024
reviewed by Sarah Ditum
‘Nicholson’s lively, intimate history of beauty wants us to take a more sympathetic view of the women who engage in the often-condemned and sometimes dangerous quest for gorgeousness. All the Rage sits you at the dressing table of history: a place of dreams, doubts, self-harm and hopes.’
Novelist LOUISA YOUNG reviewed ALL THE RAGE for Perspective Magazine:
‘This is a fascinating book: funny, unexpected, forgiving, political, personal, glamorous and yes, quietly, angry. Read it for the amazing stories; stay for the self-knowledge. Or the Revolution.’
- ENDORSEMENTS -
‘Virginia Nicholson is one of the great social historians of our time. No one else makes history this fun…
In All the Rage, the incomparable Virginia Nicholson, shaped and armed by her unconventional childhood among the Bloomsbury Set, is unafraid of skewering the social conventions that bound her generation. The tragedy of the myth of beauty, Nicholson shows, is that it was never a myth. I love her writing.’
Amanda Foreman, author of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire
‘A scintillating survey of the changing face of beauty, examining a century of history that saw women’s bodies become a battleground for emancipation. This encompassing account is bold in its scope, yet filled with intriguing details and thoughtful original analysis of the codes, conventions and contradictions of female fashion and beauty.’
Justine Picardie, author of Coco Chanel
‘Virginia Nicholson is the outstanding recorder of British lives in the twentieth century.’
Carmen Callil
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
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I’ve now written six books of social history. The last to be published, How Was it for You? Women, Sex, Love and Power in the 1960s, came out 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.
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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.
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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.”
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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).