The series was commissioned by Ben Stephenson and Lucy Richer, and produced by Ecosse Films in association with Tiger Aspect Productions.
[7][8] The main roles were played by:[9] Writing in UK newspaper The Guardian, Lucy Mangan found that, "The drama took a certain effort of will to get into.
From Phoebe Fox and Lydia Leonard as the loving/warring sisters Vanessa, soon-to-be-Bell, and Virginia, slightly-later-to-be-Woolf, around whose increasingly strained relationship the story essentially revolves, to the doctor in a single scene realising his patient (the painter Duncan Grant) is 'an invert', the performances are uniformly wonderful (though Ed Birch as Lytton Strachey has so far the best part and the best time).
[10] In The Independent, Ellen E Jones was less impressed, writing: "The romantic entanglements of this set are so complicated that there is an undeniable achievement in laying them out clearly, as writer Amanda Coe has done here.
Alas, the work's the thing and while this opening episode contained all the gossip, it conveyed none of the depth of thought or artistic feeling that must ultimately justify our interest (if any) in these people".