Carrington: A Life

by Gretchen Holbrook Gerzina

Here is an absorbing biography of the English artist Dora Carrington, who called herself simply "Carrington". She was a woman who made a vivid impression on those she met―she was portrayed (or caricatured), for example, in novels by Wyndham Lewis, D. H. Lawrence, and Aldous Huxley. Hopelessly in love with the noted writer Lytton Strachey, she achieved notoriety by killing herself shortly after his death.

A talented painter, living a bohemian life, Carrington was torn by conflicts as an artist and a woman, including the shrewd and inquisitive Bloomsbury group. Carrington’s paintings, however, reveal much of her remarkable and original cast of mind, and since her death her reputation as an artist has grown steadily. Her work is new represented in major collections worldwide.

Genres: Biography, Art, History, Nonfiction, Biography Memoir, Gender, Historical

342 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1989

About the author

Gretchen Holbrook Gerzina is Paul Murray Kendall Professor of Biography and Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts/Amherst. She is the author of Frances Hodgson Burnett: The Unexpected Life of the Author of The Secret Garden (2004).

Reviews

[Paul · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very good biography of one of the more tragic figures on the edges of the Bloomsbury set. Carrington (she didn't like to use her first name) was an artist who studied at the Slade. Carrington's relationship to Bloomsbury was a little ambivalent and she is a complex figure. Her upbringing, which was strict had made her very wary of her sexuality and she had a clear loathing of herself and her femininity much of the time. The love of her life was the eminent writer Lytton Strachey, who was gay.He loved her in return and they kept house together from 1917 until his death in 1932. So close was their bond, that when Carrington did marry, her husband moved in with them.
Carrington had affairs with men and women; this makes her sound promiscuous, but she was not. The centre of her life was Lytton and everything else was secondary, even though their relationship was not a sexual one. She took her own life when he died.
Her art is startlingly good and she has been under appreciated as an artist over the years. Her relationship with some of the other Bloomsberries (as she called them) was rather up and down; but she was a strong character who could hold her own in most company. D H Lawrence caricatured her in Women In Love (she hated Lawrence because of his homophobia) and Aldous Huxley portrayed her as a sex therapist in Chrome Yellow.
This is a competent biography; when I have read some biographies I am often relieved to be out of the company of the subject. Not the case with Carrington; I liked her.

[Paul Bryant · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you read English literature of the early 20th century you eventually kind of get sucked in to the Bloomsbury group, first by Virginia Woolf, then by Lytton Strachey, they act like a very polite whirlpool which serves you tea and cakes at 4 o'clock. And eventually you come upon the remarkable character of Dora Carrington and then you're at the heart of all the entanglements. Back in the 1920s and 30s, in upper class England, these Bloomsbury oddballs really tried hard to disrupt the tyrannical pigeonholing of people into gay and straight, married and single, writer and artist, etc. Carrington is a person who reaches out of the pages of her own life and catches you with a single glance and that's it, you're lost.

She fell in love with Lytton Strachey who was gay, and she loved him so much she would marry or cohabit with the guys that he liked. Not that many, it wasn't like Manhattan 1979 or anything. But still. When Lytton died of cancer she lasted a couple of days and then she committed suicide. Didn't want to be around if he wasn't there.

She painted and drew beautifully and wrote a fantastically articulate emotionally drenched journal, which has been published. She was like a highly precocious 14 year old all her life.

I don't think people live lives like this any more. Probably a good thing.

[Rosemary Atwell · Rating 4 out of 5]

Dora Carrington is far and away one of the most intriguing and less self-centred of the ‘Bloomsberries,’ and this sympathetic and gentle biography is certainly worthy of investigation.

Despite her life and subsequent ‘fame’ suffering somewhat through being constantly overshadowed by - and often merely appendixed to - Lytton Strachey, Gretchen Gerzina continually demonstrates that Carrington’s individuality and idiosyncrasies resulted in her being ardently admired and desired by both men and women, and that her work as a painter deserves wider recognition.

Besides being an admirable biography, ‘Carrington’ also succeeds in capturing the mood and rapid changes in English culture and society in the first quarter of the twentieth century.

[Rosemary · Rating 3 out of 5]

I saw the film "Carrington" with Emma Thompson in the title role and Jonathan Pryce as Lytton Strachey a number of years ago, so when I came across this biography of the English painter Dora Carrington (1893-1932), I was anxious to learn more about her and her relationships with the Bloomsbury group and her great attachment to Lytton Strachey, who adored her. Here it is in all the excruciating detail anyone could want, with many long passages from letters written to and by Carrington, numerous footnotes (well, endnotes, really, since they're all at the back of the book), an index, and blow by blow accounts of all of Carrington's relationships.

The first part of the book covers Carrington's difficult family life: an older, loving, and indulgent father whom she strove to please, a younger, stern mother intent on upholding Victorian morals whom Carrington's disliked and who constantly chided and disapproved of her.

Carrington's natural talent for sketching gave her an escape to better schools, most notably the Slade in London, where she won prizes for her drawings and met people with wider and more relaxed world views.

The most difficult part of the book to get through was that concerning her relationship with the artist Mark Gertler who spent a couple of years browbeating her into having sex with him. Carrington wasn't interested in having sex with anyone at that point, but she did pursue deep friendships with men, always holding them at a distance. She got into a similar situation with Gerald Brenan later in life though they were sometimes lovers. This was after her marriage to Ralph Partridge. Through all this she was completely devoted to Lytton Strachey, a fairly openly homosexual man about ten years her senior. Her living situations always included him and sometimes her husband. Lovers sometimes came to visit.

Carrington was always confused or ambivalent about her sexuality and her life, and her relationships were complicated. She suffered from terrifying nightmares most of her life and offers interpretations of some in her diary. She doesn't like being a woman, is repulsed by menstruation, and sometimes wishes she were a boy. She had a few female lovers, and her greatest love was for an openly homosexual man. She was married and had a handful of male lovers.

She was a good painter but was often distracted from her work by domestic chores. She had little self-confidence in her work because early in her career Roger Fry had belittled her work and because Mark Gertler had always made harsh comments and criticized her for not taking up serious subjects in her art. Carrington seldom showed her work, despite the urgings of friends and praise from Lytton and Ralph, because she believed (wrongly) that it wasn't good. In her sometimes busy and crowded household, it was hard to find uninterrupted time or privacy to paint. And because she was perpetually short of money, she spent many hours painting decorative glass tiles for sale (anonymously) in shops in London.

The text of the book is sprinkled with delightful doodles, small sketches, and little drawings that Carrington made. Some she put in her letters and journals. The two groups of plates were very disappointing. Everything was in black and white. There were only a few paintings and, though they are described in detail in the text, the reproductions don't really give any indication of the actual artwork. I looked Carrington's paintings up on the Internet and was struck by the vibrant colors. Both the portraits and the landscapes were wonderfully done. The photographs of people in the book were of poor quality, but that may just be the state of the originals.

All in all, while I found the book sometimes tiresome in its detail, and the discussions and reproductions of art lacking, I did learn a great deal about Carrington herself as well as about the circles in which she moved. I think her reputation as an artist is being revived and more people are appreciating her work, and that's a good thing.

[Jean-Luke · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dora Carrington was born near the end of the Victorian era, and committed suicide in 1932, at the age of 39. She was an artist whose work went unlauded in her lifetime, despite the eminent figures—many of them part of the Bloomsbury group—with whom she mingled throughout the years at various now famous country houses.

Much of her short life was complicated by "ladies in love with buggers, and buggers in love with womanisers," as her friend, companion and renowned biographer Lytton Strachey put it. Her romantic relationships—with men, and later with a woman—were every bit as complicated as those of the rest of the Bloomsbury group. She couldn't commit and couldn't let go, and frequently inspired obsessive attachments or became obsessively attached, the result of which was often an emotionally taxing love triangle.

Emma Thompson stars as Carrington in a 1995 film and this was my introduction to Carrington's life and work. While still alive Carrington inspired a character in Crome Yellow by Aldous Huxley as well as in DH Lawrence's Women in Love, and in later decades she featured in countless memoirs by those who had known her. Gerzina's biography makes generous use of letters and the often included drawings sent and received by Carrington, and fuels a burning passion for the intrigues of the 'Bloomsberries.' I first stumbled across it at a vacation rental in New Hampshire and, having begun to read it one evening, nearly permanently borrowed it to keep me company going home. (I ultimately resisted.)

[Margaret · Rating 4 out of 5]

Gerzina provides an insightful portrait of the Bloomsbury artist Dora Carrington (who went by only her last name for most of her life) who was in love with and lived with the writer Lytton Strachey (and killed herself after his death). It's full of quotations from Carrington's lively, idiosyncratic letters and of her illustrations, drawings, and paintings. Gerzina's story is well-researched and well-told, bringing Carrington to life as a vivid personality in her own right, rather than the Strachey appendage to which she is so often reduced.

[Tanya Hurst · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this book. I've been a fan of Carrington's artwork for many years, and I've read through some of her published letters and diary. It's a fascinating biography of a very interesting woman. I found a lot of it very personally meaningful.

[Bettie · Rating 4 out of 5]

read before Goodreads

[Pamela Wetherill · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very sensitively written and fairly thorough. She spares us much of the Freudian psychology that accompanies many descriptions of Carrington, and she has a healthy respect for Carrington's relationship with Strachey.

[Chris · Rating 3 out of 5]

I didn’t love the writing, but I was definitely intrigued by Carrington’s life story. I would say it’s worth the read, but it’s not the book you can’t put down.

[Susannah · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very well written and thoroughly researched, this biography of Carrington goes into detail about her life and loves. It's a striking portrait of a woman who wasn't comfortable in her skin but nonetheless found happiness by creating a new kind of family. (The modern term is "urban tribe".) She had a decades long love affair with a gay man, the writer Lytton Strachey, with whom she lived for 17 years, occasionally in the company of her husband or lovers, and occasionally in the company of his. She painted odd and striking pictures, but rarely showed them. She kept house, and painted, and gardened, and wrote copious letters, many of which provide the details needed to know her thoughts and feelings. An extraordinary life with a surprising ending that is shown fully fleshed in this excellent volume.

[Adam O'Leary · Rating 5 out of 5]

An engrossing read about the artist Dora Carrington, who led a complicated life of live and friendship amongst, and yet somewhat removed from, the Bloomsbury set in the early 20th century. Her life, straddling the Victorian and modern eras, was dominated by her relationship the writer Lytton Strachey, whose homosexuality allowed Carrington both freedom and companionship. In describing a life lived to the full, tragically cut short by suicide after Strachey's death, Gerzina expresses Carrington's alluring, enigmatic and loving personality and I found myself greatly moved by the final chapters.

[Paul Leclercq]

This is a wonderful biography of a hugely talented artist, and highly complex human being. Gerzina treats her subject with great insight and sensitivity; I found it extremely moving, and cannot recommend it highly enough.

I find the character of Dora Carrington very attractive despite all he inner demons. I would also recommend Jane Hill's The Art of Dora Carringotn which contains reproductions of many of her wonderful paintings.

[Karen-Leigh · Rating 3 out of 5]

Connections, connections, connections. I am going from one biography to the next, each connected to the one before and the one after through a lover, a sibling, a group like Bloomsbury, type of lifestyle, political affiliation, ancestors and marital connections. The arts, the literati and what most of them have in common is....they were prolific letter writers, journal/diary keepers, they painted each other, they wrote biographies of each other and they gossiped.

[Hazel · Rating 2 out of 5]

I'm just skimming this, so far. I stumbled across Gerzina's name here on Goodreads and a little investigation took me to this biography of the underappreciated painter. I remember seeing the film starring Emma Thompson, and was curious about the real story.