Julian Heward Bell (4 February 1908 – 18 July 1937) was an English poet, and the son of Clive and Vanessa Bell (who was the elder sister of Virginia Woolf). The writer Quentin Bell was his younger brother and the writer and painter Angelica Garnett was his half-sister. His relationship with his mother is explored in Susan Sellers' novel Vanessa and Virginia.
In 1935 he went to China, to a position teaching English at Wuhan University. He wrote letters describing his relationship with a married lover, K. - Ling Shuhua, the wife of Professor Chen Yuan (better known by his pen-name, Chen Xiying). The identity of 'K' became a sensitive issue when the Chinese-British novelist Hong Ying published a fictionalised account, K: The Art of Love in 1999. After a 2002 ruling by a Chinese court, that the book was 'defamation of the dead', the author rewrote the book, which was published in 2003 under the title The English Lover.
In 1937, Bell became increasingly supportive of the socialist and anti-fascist movements and decided to enlist in the Spanish Civil War.[3] His parents and his aunt Virginia tried to dissuade him; eventually, they persuaded Julian to get a job as an ambulance driver on the Republican side, rather than a soldier.[3] His motive for going to Spain was general sympathy for the cause of the Spanish Republic, plus "the usefulness of war experience in the future and the prestige one would gain in literature and – even more – Left politics".[4] After just a month in Spain he found himself in the thick of the action, driving an ambulance for the British Medical Unit attached to the International Brigades at the Battle of Brunete. He was hit by bomb fragments on a stretch of road just outside Villanueva de la Cañada, sustaining a massive lung wound, and later died in a military hospital at El Escorial. He was 29.[5]
^"JULIAN BELL BY VANESSA BELL". Charleston: The Bloomsbury Home of Art and Ideas. Archived from the original on 10 April 2020. Retrieved 10 April 2020. Julian felt no qualms in telling his mother of his first sexual experience in a letter of 1929, 'My great news is about Ant[h]ony. I feel certain you won't be upset or shaked at my telling you that we sleep together.
^Peter Brock, Harvey Leonard Dyck, The Pacifist Impulse in Historical Perspective. Toronto; University of Toronto Press, 1996 ISBN0802007775 (p. 360)
^ abLinda Palfreeman, Salud!: British Volunteers in the Republican Medical Service During the Spanish Civil War, 1936–1939
Sussex Academic Press, 2012 ISBN1845195191 (pp. 270–1)
^Hugh Thomas: "The Spanish Civil War", London 1974, p. 590 n.2.
