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).

At the heart of this history is the female body.

The century-span between the crinoline and the bikini witnessed more mutations in the ideal western woman’s body shape than at any other period.

In this richly detailed account, Virginia Nicholson, described as “one of the great social historians of our time…”(Amanda Foreman) takes us to the Frontline of Beauty to reveal the power, the pain and the pleasure involved in adorning the female body.

The Power

Who determines which shape is currently ‘all the rage’? Looking at how custom, colour, class and sex fit into the picture, this book also charts how the advances made by feminism collided with the changing shape of desirability.

The Pain

Here is Gladys, who had botched surgery on her nose; Dorothy, whose skin colour lost her an Oscar; Beccy who took slimming pills and died; and – unbelievably – the radioactive corset.

The Pleasure

Here are the ‘New Women’ who discovered freedom by bobbing their hair; the boyish, athletic ‘Health and Beauty’ ladies in black knickers; and starlets in bohemian beachwear. Among the first to experience true women’s liberation were the early adopters of trousers.

Encompassing two world wars and a revolution in women’s rights, All the Rage tells the story of western female beauty from 1860 – 1960, chronicling its codes, its contradictions, its lies, its highs – and its underlying power struggle.

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‘Intimate, immersive, often moving, How Was it For You? subtly but powerfully subverts complacent male assumptions about a legendary decade.’

David Kynaston

The cliché of the 1960s: the Pill, Beatlemania, the mini-skirt and Swinging London. A world of Free Love which appeared to promise peace, love and togetherness.

But what was the flip side of a youth supposedly given over to sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll? How Was It For You? reconstructs the real 1960s, putting the women who lived it centre stage.

How Was it for You?  follows its predecessors (Perfect Wives in Ideal Homes and Millions Like Us) in tracking the 20th Century through the experiences of women from 1960-1970.

‘With fine intelligence and irresistible brio, Virginia Nicholson brings alive the moral rigidity, panty-wetting Beatlemania, and A-bomb nihilism of 60s England. What was left for women to do? Shake it out and shake it up, and they did. How Was It For You? is a kaleidoscopic tribute to the generation that put the “F” into feminism. I ripped through it with gusto and delight.’

Tina Brown

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‘Entertaining, and shocking... Nicholson succeeds brilliantly… I was completely gripped...’

Daily Telegraph

‘Nicholson’s book should be necessary reading…’

The Sunday Times

In the 1950s women were told how to lure their man to the altar. Once married, they were told they could have it all – washing machines, fridges and TVs. But the deal was: stay in the home, cook, and bring up the children. Perfect Wives in Ideal Homes is a story of submission and struggle, rebellion and reward. 

Millions Like Us covers the war and its aftermath, 1939-1949 and was Viking’s lead non-fiction title in Spring 2011. This book tracks women’s experiences of a momentous decade through a host of individual stories, drawing on autobiographies, archives and living memory.

““Millions Like Us deserves to be a bestseller…””
— The Daily Mail

There is nothing new about young women who can’t find relationships. Singled Out tells the moving and inspiring story of that generation - known as the 'Surplus Women’ - who discovered after the 1914-18 war that there were, quite simply, not enough men to go round. 

““Inspiring, lovingly researched, well-written and humane…”
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— The Economist
 

Among the Bohemians charts the valiant domestic experiments of the rebels and free spirits, artists, poets, writers and composers, who in the early twentieth century declared war on Victorian conformity.

““Popular history at its most gossipy and intelligent… This book is a joy.””
— The Observer

Co-authored with her father Quentin Bell, Virginia Nicholson’s first book is a true insider’s view. Gavin Kingcome’s delectable photographs breathe life into the colourful interiors and garden of the Sussex farmhouse occupied by artists Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant and their family and friends. 

““A wonderful book about the Sussex farmhouse inhabited by members of the Bloomsbury Group…””
— Sunday Telegraph
Vanessa Bell painting of Charleston Pond, 1919

Vanessa Bell painting of Charleston Pond, 1919

  • “ Perfect Wives in Ideal Homes
    "As social history, it bears comparison with David Kynaston’s Family Britain. Nicholson has the same knack of seamlessly piecing gripping individual stories into a panorama of everyday life." ”
    — Bee Wilson, The Sunday Times
  • “ Millions Like Us
    “It's hard to single out stories from this rich, entwined narrative, which moves in and out of the lives of an absorbing cast of characters... Vividly entertaining, uplifting and humbling, Millions Like Us deserves to be a bestseller...” ”
    — Bel Mooney, The Daily Mail
  • “ Singled Out
    “It is high time to dig [this generation] up again, salute their memory and listen to their sad and uncomplaining voices unmuffled at last in Nicholson’s brave, humane and honest book.” ”
    — Hilary Spurling, the Observer
  • “ Among the Bohemians
    “An extraordinarily rich, provocative study. [Nicholson’s] substantial cast is stage-managed superbly… This book is not just good fun. It raises profound questions about our lives.” ”
    — Christina Hardyment, The Independent