
Regarding paintings of nude women and the "extreme activity of women in philanthropy, society, religion and all pursuits requiring clothing," Virginia Woolf wrote of "the very fact that every Victorian family has in its cupboard the skeleton of an aunt who was driven to convert the native [sic] because her father would have died rather than let her look upon a naked man. And so she went to Church; and so she went to China; and so she died unwed; and so there drop out of the cupboard with her bones half a dozen flower pieces done under the shade of a white umbrella in a Surrey garden when Queen Victoria was on the throne." -- from Foreword to Recent Paintings by Vanessa Bell (1930)