Carrington’s Letters

Edited by Anne Chisholm (Chatto & Windus, £30)

The Bloomsbury Group still arouses great interest, so this new and enlarged edition of Dora Carrington’s letters (the first was published in 1970, edited by David Garnett with extracts from her diaries) is perhaps no surprise. The book contains previously unpublished material, but then it seems that some 2,000 letters by her survive, of which more than 500 were addressed to lytton strachey, 400 to Gerald Brenan and 150 to mark Gertler, so plenty of choice.

These figures are the main co-ordinates of her existence: strachey, the love of her life despite his homosexuality, Gertler and then Brenan, men with whom she had deeply unsatisfactory affairs. In between, she married ralph partridge and they lived together in the country, first at Tidmarsh, later at ham spray house, both in Berkshire, in an unusual threesome with strachey.

Carrington’s story is well known from Christopher hampton’s 1995 film, but that was inevitably an over-simplification of her complex personality and life. here, the sometimes wearisome detail is supplied over 400 pages. Anne Chisholm delivers a minimum of editorial interference, which makes this a hard book to read all at once: the narrative is inevitably one-sided and the reader longs for the correspondents’ replies to vary the tone a little.

Carrington was a prolific letter writer and also wrote a diary, so quite when she found time to paint is something of a mystery. In fact, reading these self-obsessed missives, it becomes clear that writing was a kind of displacement activity for her. Despite being the star of her year as a slade student, she never fulfilled this early promise and preferred to make tiles or decorative glass pictures than risk ambitious paintings. If you’ve ever been puzzled by the Carrington phenomenon, this book explains her particular allure. Andrew Lambirth