Carrington's Letters: Her Art, Her Loves, Her Friendships

by Dora Carrington

Dora Carrington was considered an outsider to Bloomsbury, but she lived right at its heart. Known only by her surname, she was the star of her year at the Slade School of Fine Art, but never achieved the fame her early career promised. For over a decade she was the companion of homosexual writer Lytton Strachey, and killed herself, stricken without him, when he died in 1932. She was also a prolific and exuberant correspondent. Carrington was not consciously a pioneer or a feminist, but in her determination to live life according to her own nature—especially in relation to her work, her passionate friendships and her fluid attitude to sex, gender and sexuality—she fought battles that remain familiar and urgent today. She was friends with the greatest minds of the day and her correspondence stars a roster of fascinating characters—Virginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell, Rosamund Lehmann, Maynard Keynes to name but a few. Carrington’s Letters introduces the maverick artist and compelling personality to a new generation for the first time with fresh correspondence never before published. Unmediated, passionate, startlingly honest and very playful, reading Carrington’s letters is like having her whisper in your ear and embrace you gleefully.

Genres: Nonfiction, Art, Art History

448 pages, Hardcover

Published November 23, 2017

Reviews

[Beth Bonini · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed this collection of letters from Dora Carrington - artist, and Bloomsbury Group friend - but I probably wouldn’t recommend it to anyone but a true Bloomsbury enthusiast. Carrington was an interesting painter, and I think she created a handful of outstanding works - her famous portrait of Lytton Strachey being one of my own favourites - but she rarely refers to ‘her work’ in her letters. She’s also not much for history or politics. This collection mostly spans the World War I years and the 1920s; yet despite being such a turbulent time in English history, Carrington rarely refers to the events which loom so large in historical accounts. Her letters are intimate in tone, and most often discuss her feelings about friends and romantic relationships. Other pet topics are the weather, food, houses, walks, the landscape, pets and parties. She does have a charming voice, though, despite claiming - often - that she is ‘no writer’ and that her letters are very stupid. Despite growing up in a middle-class Victorian family, she lived in an astonishingly ‘free’ and bohemian way. She chose to be in an artist; she managed her own money; she didn’t want children, and only agreed to marriage (with Ralph Partridge) because it suited the ménage a trois living arrangement she had with Lytton Strachey. Strachey - writer, historian, homosexual - was the true love of her life, and although there are many letters in this collection to another lover (Gerald Brenan), her adoration of Strachey is the one consistent theme running through the collection.

The 2017 reissue by Chatto & Windus is absolutely beautiful: cover, endpapers, illustrations and photographs of Carrington and her friends all add up to a pleasing whole. One does feel, though, that this collection of letters does not really ‘capture’ the elusive, mysterious and fascinating modern woman that was Dora Carrington.

[Jonathan · Rating 4 out of 5]

A selection of Dora Carrington's letters. They are mostly quite everyday, talking about friends and her life, but her friends are all well-known, whether part of the Bloomsbury set or not and her life was one that was unusual to say the least. Living mostly with the love of her life, Lytton Strachey, who was gay, theirs was a rural household, but one that was dedicated to art and books and people. Apart from Lytton, the two most important men in her life were her sometime husband, Ralph Partridge, and her lover Gerald Brennan, but with neither did she have a particularly fulfilling physical relationship. This selection has printed previously unpublished letters which refer to her affairs with women. Some of the letters had amusing drawings accompanying them, many of which are reproduced alongside her words. Every so often Carrington produces some amazing descriptive passages, especially about the countryside, that I found breathtakingly beautiful.

[Jeff Howells · Rating 4 out of 5]

My enduring fascination with the core (and associate) members of the Bloomsbury Group shows no sign of fading. I’ve long been interested in the life of Dora Carrington, dating back to when I watched the film of her life starring Emma Thompson back in mid 1990s.
She was an artist and the friend/lover of a number of them, most famously her relationship with the author Lytton Strachey. They were very much an unconventional and unlikely couple - mainly due to the fact that Strachey was gay.
Her star at last seems to be on the ascendant - I bought this book at a recent retrospective of her work at the Pallant Gallery in Chichester.
These letters are a wonderful insight into her life, but be warned the last 20 or so pages are so intensely sad and a shine a spotlight on how grief can take hold of you.

[Evelyn · Rating 2 out of 5]

I made it halfway, so I'm counting this as read. I simply can't make it to the end. For a decade I have voraciously read and enjoyed every scrap, every diary entry, every morsel of information regarding the bright young things as well as ancillary cadre's of writers from this time, so I thought I could enjoy a side-step into a similar consumption of Bloomsbury group content, but this was absolute garbage for me. Given my endless enjoyment of reading about the inane daily goings on of long dead people, many of whom were frankly terrible, it surprises me that I disliked this so much. It was wholly uninteresting and referred to possibly interesting people (I don't know that much about the Bloomsbury group frankly) in the least interesting ways possible.

I felt sympathy in seeing her cyclical troubles with male friends, one in particular who hounded her for sex in a way too reminiscent of today to be anything but tiring. But she does whatever possible to maintain that relationship despite how tedious it is, so I quickly reached the point where l I just didn't want to know about it anymore, it was all so patently stupid.

I may give the Bloomsbury group another go in the future, but this has put me off for a good while.

[Paulo Santos · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a very disappointed book. I'm a dedicated consumer of everything regarding Bloomsbury, and I've been interested in Carrington ever since I read about her in Virginia Woolf's Diaries, and then the beautiful and moving motion picture from the 90s, and Lytton Strachey's biography. And Frances Partridge highly recommended Carrington's letters in her diaries, so I was very keen to read them. But they really are not very interesting, apart from some moving diary entries after Lytton's death and a few pieces of gossip concerning Bloomsbury. Carrington really couldn't write very well, she comes across as a sad and frustrated character and artist, moderately talented and utterly unhappy for being hopelessly in love with the committed homosexual Lytton. But then all that was perfectly expressed in the 90s movie, so nothing new.

[Adrien · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fascinating and utterly heartbreaking.