Bloomsbury disrobed- Carrington's beguiling and gleeful letters take us beyond Bloomsbury into discussion about sexual mores, how to be an artist, and what it is to be truly oneself
Dora Carrington was born in 1893 in Hereford. At seventeen she
enrolled at the Slade School of Fine Art, part of an extraordinary
generation of painters including Mark Gertler and Paul and John
Nash. She painted her friends, her house, her animals, her
furniture and designed jackets for books published by Virginia and
Leonard Woolf's Hogarth Press. She was the long-time companion of
writer Lytton Strachey, though in 1921 she married Ralph Partridge,
who joined her and Lytton in a largely harmonious menage trois. In
1932, after the death of Strachey from cancer, she committed
suicide, aged thirty-eight.
Anne Chisholm is a biographer and critic who has also worked in
journalism and publishing. She has written biographies of Nancy
Cunard, which won the Silver PEN Prize for non-fiction, Lord
Beaverbrook (with Michael Davie) which was runner-up for the
Hawthornden Prize, and, most recently, of the diarist and
Bloomsbury insider Frances Partridge, which was shortlisted for the
Marsh Biography Award. She is a former chair and now vice president
of the Royal Society of Literature.
Though Virginia and Vanessa, Clive and Bertie, Bunny and Roger all
feature, this is much more than another tribute to the tribe
*Daily Telegraph*
Chisholm’s masterstoke is to celebrate the letter as artwork…
Letters are, of course, a site of aesthetic experiment and
creativity, and to view them as such permits the artistry of the
fragment to stand, enabling the collage collection to tell other
stories of form and function
*Times Literary Supplement*
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