Priya Parmar realised that she wanted to know everything possible about painter Vanessa Bell after she chanced upon a letter Bell wrote to art critic Clive Bell in 1905. Clive was asking her to marry him, and she refused. "Her ‘no’ is so modern, not like a lady saying no to a man in 1905. This letter could have been written last week. I needed to know her better," says Parmar in a telephonic chat from London, her base when she isn’t in Hawaii for half the year.