Carrington's Letters

by Dora Carrington

  fn37 Asquith had been ousted as prime minister in favour of Lloyd George in 1916. Married to the formidable Margot, he was famously susceptible to young women. Reginald MacKenna was Home Secretary and Chancellor of the Exchequer under Asquith.

  fn38 Roger Fry’s house in Surrey.

  fn39 Pernel Strachey (1876–1951) taught French at Newnham, where she became principal in 1927.

  fn40 The Woolfs were away on holiday.

  fn41 Lytton’s brother Oliver Strachey had worked as a civil servant in India but was now a leading cryptographer working in Military Intelligence.

  fn42 S. S. Koteliansky (1880–1955) was a Russian Jewish translator who moved to London in 1911 where he became friends with the Woolfs, D. H. Lawrence, Katherine Mansfield and Mark Gertler.

  fn43 In 1917, the Zeppelin airships that had been bombing Britain since 1915 were joined by planes and the raids intensified. London was bombed in October.

  fn44 A close friend from the Slade.

  fn45 A girl of seventeen who was trying to learn to paint. Carrington took on such work with reluctance.

  fn46 Eminent Victorians was to be published the following year.

  fn47 In 1911, Oliver Strachey married for the second time. His new wife Rachel (Ray) Costelloe was an ardent suffragist and her mother, Mary, was married to the art historian and dealer Bernard Berenson.

  fn48 Mrs Legg, employed as cook-housekeeper.

  fn49 Boris Anrep (1883–1969), mosaicist, was born in St Petersburg and moved to London in 1911. A friend of Augustus John, he married Dorelia’s friend Helen Maitland in 1918. She later left him to live with Roger Fry.

  fn50 Two handsome small towns close to Garsington.

  fn51 Henri Gaudier-Brzeska (1891–1915), French sculptor living in London who died in the trenches in France.

  fn52 Lady Constance Malleson (1895–1975), actress and new mistress to Bertrand Russell, Ottoline’s former lover.

  fn53 A right-wing publication.

  fn54 Reginald Sherring Partridge, (1894–1960) known at this time as Rex and later as Ralph, at Lytton’s behest. He was to remain Ralph for the rest of his life.

  fn55 Field Marshal Sir William Robertson (1860–1933), a former footman who rose through the ranks to become Chief of the Imperial General Staff from 1916 to 1918.

  fn56 Anatole France (1844–1924), French novelist and leading man of letters. The novel she’s referring to is probably France’s 1914 novel La Révolte des anges.

  fn57 Claudius Clear was the pseudonym of a clergyman, the Rev. Dr Robertson Nicoll, who wrote about Eminent Victorians in the British Weekly without realising when Lytton Strachey was being ironic.

  fn58 Phyllis Boyd (1894–1943) was another well-connected Slade girl whose romantic looks and escapades enthralled Carrington.

  fn59 Gerald Brenan (1894–1987) and Ralph became friends during the war in France.

  fn60 H. B. Irving (1870–1919) was the actor son of the great actor manager Sir Henry Irving (1838–1905).

  fn61 William Heinemann (1863–1920) founded the eponymous publishing house in 1890. His authors included R. L. Stevenson, Rudyard Kipling and H. G. Wells.

  fn62 Dorothy Bussy (1865–1960), née Strachey, was one of Lytton’s five sisters and had married the French painter Simon Bussy in 1905. She became a translator and writer, notably of the novel of schoolgirl passion Olivia (1949).

  fn63 The Box family lived at Welcombe Farm where Carrington and other friends often stayed. She painted Mrs Box’s portrait in 1919.

  fn64 Despised and Rejected was a novel by Rose Allatini published in 1918 under the pseudonym A. T. Fitzroy. It was banned on account of its sympathetic treatment of pacifism and homosexuality.

  fn65 Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson (1862–1932), Cambridge classical scholar and philosopher who met Lytton and all Bloomsbury through his great friend Roger Fry.

  fn66 A small bathing pool at the Mill.

  fn67 Geoffrey Nelson was a young painter to whom Lytton was briefly attracted.

  fn68 Perhaps she meant ‘toujours’ (always)?

  fn69 Arthur Waley (1889–1966), another Cambridge friend of Lytton’s who joined the British Museum Oriental Prints and Manuscripts Department in 1913 and became the leading translator of Chinese and Japanese poetry.

  fn70 Gwen Wilson was Gilbert Cannan’s mistress. He left his wife in 1918 and thereafter lived in a ménage à trois with her husband, Henry Mond.

  fn71 Ellis Ashmead Bartlett (1881–1931) was an outstanding war correspondent who reported critically on the battle of Gallipoli in 1915.

  fn72 Barbara was recovering from the birth of her daughter Judith.

  fn73 Antinous (111–130) was the young lover of the Roman Emperor Hadrian.

  fn74 Carrington perhaps had a mild case of the 1918 flu that decimated post-war Europe.

  fn75 Howard Hannay, a fellow lodger in Hampstead.

  fn76 Presumably Phyllis Boyd and an admirer.

  fn77 Alphonse Daudet (1849–1897), French writer best known for Lettres de mon moulin (Letters from my Mill), published in 1869.

  fn78 Tancred Borenius (1885–1948) was a Finnish art historian and academic and a friend and colleague of Roger Fry’s.

  fn79 Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800–59), the great Whig historian, published an essay on Ranke’s History of the Popes in 1840.

  fn80 Keynes bought the Cézanne, a still life of apples, in Paris in 1918. He took it to Charleston and as he had too much to carry left it briefly behind a hedge. It is now in the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge.

  fn81 Perhaps a performance by Sergei Diaghilev’s company the Ballets Russes, then taking Bloomsbury by storm.

  fn82 Bertrand Russell had published Proposed Roads to Freedom: Socialism, Anarchism and Syndicalism in 1918.

  fn83 A potential cook-housekeeper.

  fn84 Margaret Waley, Arthur Waley’s mother.

  fn85 Walter Raleigh (1861–1922) was a fellow of Merton College and chair of English Literature at Oxford.

  fn86 Keynes was suffering from exhaustion due to his work as the Treasury representative at the Paris Peace Conference.

  fn87 Daisy Ashford’s novel The Young Visiters had just been published. She had indeed written it at the age of nine.

  fn88 Elizabeth Asquith (1897–1945), daughter of the former prime minister, had just married the Romanian diplomat Prince Antoine Bibesco (1878–1951), a friend of Marcel Proust’s. She was twenty-one and he was forty.

  fn89 Frank Prewett (1893–1962) was a handsome Canadian poet known as Toronto who was brought to Garsington by Siegfried Sassoon.

  fn90 Charlie Sanger was another of Lytton’s Cambridge friends.

  fn91 Ottoline Morrell was a great enthusiast for the Ballets Russes, run by Diaghilev and starring Massine. Picasso had come over from Paris, where he had made the aquaintance of Clive Bell, to design sets.

  fn92 Presumably George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950), playwright.

  fn93 James Strachey, who was living with Alix, later his wife, was also romantically involved with Noel Olivier.

  fn94 Bishop Creighton (1843–1901), a revered churchman and historian, had studied at Merton.

  fn95 Noel was joining the Clarendon Press, part of the Oxford University Press.

  fn96 Carrington had done four woodcuts to illustrate Two Stories by Virginia and Leonard Woolf, the first book published by the Hogarth Press in 1917.

  fn97 Ralph was going on holiday to northern Spain, unsure of Carrington’s feelings towards him.

  fn98 Julian Morrell and her governess Juliette Baillot.

  fn99 Ethel Sands (1873–1962) was a well-off and well-connected artist born in America who lived and entertained lavishly in London, Oxfordshire and France with her lifelong partner, Nan Hudson, also a painter. They ran a hospital in France during the war, and Sands became a British citizen in 1916.

  fn100 E. M. Forster (1879–1970), novelist, had known Lytton since Cambridge. His most recent book, Howards End, had been published in 1910, but in 1915 he had
sent Lytton the manuscript of Maurice, in which he attempted to write truthfully about homosexual love. Lytton approved of the intention but felt the book was not a success; it remained unpublished until 1971. Perhaps Carrington is referring to it here.

  fn101 Strachey was writing a biography of Queen Victoria.

  fn102 Carrington had been to stay with the Waleys.

  fn103 Alvaro ‘Chili’ Guevara (1894–1951) was Chilean, hence his nickname. He had studied at the Slade 1913–16, and became a fashionable portrait painter attractive to both sexes.

  fn104 Keynes’s important and prescient new book was The Economic Consequences of the Peace, in which he questioned the wisdom of the Allies’ punitive imposition of reparations on Germany at the Versailles Peace Conference.

  fn105 Gerald’s house was in fact at Yegen, in the Alpujarras range.

  fn106 She did. It got lost in the post.

  fn107 John Vanbrugh, (1664–1726) wrote The Relapse, or, Virtue in Danger, in 1696.

  fn108 Matthew Prior (1664–1721), poet and diplomat, said to have composed poetry while sitting on the Wittenham Clumps in Oxfordshire, a significant place for Lytton and Carrington.

  fn109 Michael Llewelyn Davies (1900-1921) was one of four orphaned brothers who became wards of J. M. Barrie. Peter Pan was inspired by him. He drowned in 1921, along with a friend, possibly a lover.

  fn110 Thomas Marshall (1893–1981) was a Fellow of Trinity. One of his sisters, Frances, was then studying at Newnham; another, Rachel, was to marry David Garnett in 1921.

  fn111 Patrick Blackett (1897–1974) was studying physics. He won the Nobel Prize in 1948.

  fn112 Fredegond Shove (1889–1949), a cousin of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell, was a poet living in Cambridge.

  fn113 Ralph turned down a place in the Oxford boat for the Boat Race against Cambridge, preferring to go to Spain with Lytton and Carrington.

  fn114 Carrington was recovering from her sinus operation.

  fn115 Dorothy Wordsworth (1771–1855) was the sister and close companion of the Romantic poet William Wordsworth (1770–1850). They lived together in the Lake District, and she described their life there in her Grasmere Journal, first published in 1897.

  fn116 John and Christine Nash, Carrington’s great friends from the Slade.

  fn117 Carrington was turning against woodcuts and printmaking.

  fn118 Carrington submitted three paintings to the London Group Exhibition at Heal’s. Vanessa Bell had encouraged her, and advised her on prices.

  fn119 James Doggart (1900–89) had served in the war and was a recent graduate in medicine from King’s College, Cambridge.

  fn120 John Hope-Johnstone (1883–1970) was one of Gerald’s closest friends. He had encouraged Gerald’s rebellion against convention, introduced him to Augustus John and to Bloomsbury. In 1912 they had attempted to walk to Bosnia together. He also tutored the John children and edited the Burlington Magazine from 1919 to 1920.

  fn121 Karin Stephen, née Costelloe (1889–1953), was a philosopher and fellow of Newnham College, Cambridge, married since 1914 to Adrian (1883–1948), younger brother of Vanessa Bell and Virginia Woolf and former lover of Duncan Grant. Like James and Alix Strachey, both Karin and Adrian Stephen became Freudian analysts in the 1920s.

  fn122 Sylvia Gosse (1881–1968) the daughter of the writer Edmund Gosse, was a painter and printmaker who ran an art school with Walter Sickert.

  fn123 Forster was to conduct a flirtatious correspondence with Ralph and make a characteristically tentative and unsuccessful pass at him.

  fn124 Birrell and Garnett was a bookshop set up by Francis Birrell (1889–1935) and David Garnett in 1920. Francis was the son of Augustine Birrell (1850–1933), a prominent Liberal Party politician, writer and wit. In love with Garnett, and like him a pacifist, they worked together for the Quakers in France during the war.

  fn125 Lady Strachey, née Jane Maria Grant (1840–1928), married Sir Richard Strachey, soldier and administrator in India, in 1859. She bore him ten children and was a leading campaigner for votes for women.

  fn126 Philippa Strachey (1872–1968) was one of Lytton’s five sisters and a passionate suffragist and feminist.

  fn127 Piero di Cosimo (1462–1522), a leading painter in Renaissance Florence, renowned for his portraits and for mythological scenes. Carrington’s description fits The Forest Fire, 1505, now in the Ashmolean in Oxford.

  fn128 Bunny’s young lady was Rachel (Ray) Marshall, who married him in 1921.

  fn129 Lady Maud Cunard (1872–1948), also known as Emerald, was a leading hostess and admirer of Lytton’s.

  fn130 Lytton’s biography, Queen Victoria, was published by Chatto & Windus in 1921.

  fn131 Valentine Dobrée (1894–1974) was the artist wife of the literary critic and man of letters Bonamy Dobrée (1891–1974) and a lover of Mark Gertler, who painted her in 1919.

  fn132 Roger Fry’s latest show, where the paintings were anonymous, included Carrington’s Tulips.

  fn133 Jonathan Swift (1667–1745), the Anglo-Irish cleric, poet and satirist, had a long and complicated romance with a much younger woman he called Vanessa. His letters to her were published after her early death.

  fn134 Presumably an OUP colleague.

  fn135 E. F. Benson (1867–1940), prolific author and champion figure skater, best known for his Mapp and Lucia novels, had published an autobiography, Our Family Affairs, in 1920.

  fn136 Gerald was to stay with the Dobrées at Larrau, their house in the Pyrenees, on his way to Yegen.

  fn137 Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941), the Bengali writer and educator, spent time in London in 1912 and won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913.

  fn138 Albert Rutherston (1881–1953), a painter, teacher and art book publisher from a rich and artistic family, who changed his name from Rotherstein in 1916, was another admirer of Carrington’s at the Slade.

  fn139 Walter John Herbert Sprott (1897–1971), known as Sebastian, was a Cambridge graduate and budding Freudian psychologist in love with Keynes.

  fn140 Irene Vanburgh (1872–1949), a fashionable leading actress.

  fn141 Treacle prints, reverse printed on glass by hand and so called because of their rich colour, were popular in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and rare thereafter.

  fn142 Probably Roland Penrose (1900–84), from a Quaker family, who had driven ambulances during the war and returned to study architecture at Cambridge.

  fn143 Joan Riviere (1883–1962) was another early disciple of Freud who became an analyst and later collaborated with the Stracheys on translating his writings for the Hogarth Press.

  fn144 Robin (1904–1988) was the third son of Augustus John.

  fn145 ‘But he is a very exquisite young man, and I am ravaged with desire for him. Alas, I wish I were a young and pretty girl too. Alas.’ Here Carrington is speaking for Lytton. The photographs were presumably of Gerald.

  fn146 This symbol was used by Carrington to indicate sexual activity. By this time, probably because she knew Ralph was sleeping with Valentine, she had been to bed with Gerald, or was promising to do so.

  fn147 An unfinished novel by Jane Austen, published in 1871.

  fn148 ‘… and may the good God look after you. Your love.’ Carrington’s German was even worse than her French.

  fn149 David Garnett’s novel, Lady into Fox, was published to great acclaim by Chatto & Windus in 1922.

  fn150 W. H. Hudson (1841–1922) was a successful novelist, naturalist and ornithologist.

  fn151 Frances Marshall (1900–2004) was Rachel Garnett’s younger sister.

  fn152 Carrington had been to visit her friend Phyllis Boyd.

  fn153 Logan Pearsall Smith (1865–1946), an influential man of letters known for his wit, was the brother-in-law of Bertrand Russell and Bernard Berenson. Robert Tatlock (1899–1954) was a friend of Roger Fry’s and editor of the Burlington Magazine.

  fn154 Beryl de Zoete (1879–1962) was a ballet dancer who later taught and wrote ab
out oriental dance and theatre. She took up with Arthur Waley in 1918, to the dismay of his old friends.

  fn155 Lydia Lopokova (1892–1981) was a leading Russian ballerina who, to the amazement and initial displeasure of Bloomsbury and the sorrow of Sebastian Sprott, took up with Maynard Keynes and married him in 1925.

  fn156 Carrington’s eldest brother, Sam.

  fn157 Sir Oswald Stoll (1886–1942), a leading theatre manager.

  fn158 Carrington is describing Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951), the Austrian philosopher, and protégé of Bertrand Russell since he arrived to study in Cambridge in 1911. His presence in the house was in a book, not in person.

  fn159 Gerald and Ralph had also been writing each other long explanatory letters.

  fn160 Thomas Hogg (1792–1862), a close friend of Shelley, wrote an unfinished posthumous biography of the poet, published in 1858.

  fn161 Mrs Jordan (1761–1816) was the actress mistress of the Duke of Clarence, later King William IV, by whom she had ten children.

  fn162 This friend was Christine Nash, nèe Kuhlenthal.

  fn163 Katherine Mansfield had been suffering from tuberculosis for some years.

  fn164 This notion of setting up another Press came to nothing.

  fn165 T. S. Eliot had started The Criterion in 1922. Early contributors included Gertrude Stein (1872–1946), the experimental novelist and art collector who lived in Paris with her lover Alice B. Toklas.

  fn166 Gerald was sleeping with his Spanish housekeeper, Maria.

  fn167 Carrington was about to be thirty. She hated getting older.

  fn168 Andrew Bonar Law (1858–1923), Conservative politician, had been Prime Minister Since 1922. He resigned through illness and died later that year.

  fn169 The identity of the American girl Gerald called E is unknown.

  fn170 Eleanora Duse (1858–1924), celebrated Italian actress, came out of retirement to tour Europe in 1921. Mrs Alving in Ibsen’s Ghosts was one of her greatest roles.

  fn171 For his thirty-first birthday. He was to pursue Mina without success though they became great friends, and had a brief affair with Henrietta.