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Bloomsbury Group

writers, artists, bohemians – literature and the arts 1900-1950

writers, artists, bohemians - literature and the arts 1900-1950

Dora Carrington biography

September 17, 2009 by Roy Johnson

painter, designer, bohemian, bisexual

Dora Carrington - portraitDora Carrington (1893-1932) was an artist and bohemian who loved and was loved by both men and women. She was born Dora de Houghton Carrington in Hereford, the daughter of a Liverpool merchant. As a somewhat wilful youngster, she found her family background quite stifling, adoring her father and loathing her mother. She attended Bedford High School, which emphasized sports, music, and drawing. The teachers encouraged her drawing and her parents paid for her to attend extra art classes in the afternoons. In 1910 she won a scholarship to the Slade School of Art in London and studied there with Henry Tonks.

The Slade at that time was a centre of what we would now call radical chic. She embraced the bohemian opportunity it offered – going to live in Gordon Square in Bloomsbury, and immediately becoming entangled in romantic liaisons with fellow painters Paul and John Nash, Christopher (‘Chips’) Nevinson, and Mark Gertler, who had a very strong influence on this first phase of her life as an artist.

She also teamed up with fellow artists Dorothy Brett and Barbara Bagenal, and they started a new fashion at the school by cutting their hair into the shape of pudding-basins and wearing plain, deeply unfashionable clothes. They were called the ‘crop heads’. She did well at the Slade, winning several prizes and moving quickly through the courses. Despite her bohemianism however, her style of painting and drawing was firmly traditional, and it fitted with the aesthetic of the Slade at that time.

She was unaffected by the craze for Post-Impressionism which followed Roger Fry‘s famous 1910 exhibition at the Grafton Galleries which Virginia Woolf claimed changed human nature that year. Her personal life was dominated by the tempestuous relationship she conducted with Gertler and Nevinson which resulted in a form of unhappiness for all concerned. Although she behaved in a provocative manner, she refused to choose between them, or to have a sexual relationship with either of them.

The Art of Dora CarringtonGertler introduced her to the society hostess Lady Ottoline Morrell, and thus into the Bloomsbury Group. In 1914 she met D.H. Lawrence and David Garnett, then joined Roger Fry’s new artists’ co-operative, the Omega Workshops, where was moderately successful in her decorative art work. It was while visiting Morrell at Garsington Manor in 1915 that Carrington made a connection that was to change the rest of her life.

She was introduced to the writer Lytton Strachey (who was in love with Mark Gertler at the time). Gertler felt that since Strachey was a confirmed homosexual, he could safely encourage their friendship. When Strachey made a sexual pass at her, she retaliated by going to his room at night with the intention of cutting off his long red beard. He awoke on her approach, and she immediately fell in love with him. It was a love that would last for the rest of her life and would even cause her to follow him from life into death.

Possessed of a remarkable personal fascination, she seemed to cast a spell on those around her. She figures in a number of novels, among them D.H. Lawrence‘s Women in Love (as Minette Darrington); Wyndham Lewis’ The Apes of God (as Betty Blythe); Rosamund Lehmann’s The Weather in the Streets (as Anna Corey); and Aldous Huxley’s Chrome Yellow (as Mary Bracegirdle). However, Carrington’s behaviour was viewed rather critically by another regular visitor to Garsington – D.H.Lawrence:

“She was always hating men, hating all active maleness in a man. She wanted passive maleness.”

She was not well known as a painter during her lifetime as she painted only for her own pleasure, did not sign her works, and rarely exhibited them. She painted and made woodcuts for the Hogarth Press, which was founded by Leonard Woolf as a therapeutic exercise for his wife Virginia.

The Life of Dora CarringtonAlthough she had kept Gertler at bay for five years, she gave herself to Strachey from the outset – then ended up having a sexual relationship with both men at the same time, even though Strachey was really a homosexual. But in 1917 Carrington ended her relationship with Gertler, and went to live with Strachey in a rented mill house.

Carrington’s father died in 1918 leaving her a small inheritance that allowed her to feel more independent. The following year she met Ralph Partridge, an Oxford friend of her younger brother Noel, who assisted Leonard Woolf at the Hogarth Press. Both Carrington and Lytton Strachey fell in love with Partridge, who accepted that she would not give up her platonic relationship or living arrangements with Strachey. She married Partridge in 1921, and Strachey with characteristic generosity paid for their wedding. All three of them went on the honeymoon to Venice. Strachey wrily observed:

“everything is at sixes and sevens – ladies in love with buggers and buggers in love with womanisers, and the price of coal going up too. Where will it all end?”

However, this somewhat unusual domestic arrangement seemed to work for all three parties. Carrington divided her time between looking after Strachey and her own art work. She painted on almost any medium she could find including glass, tiles, pub signs, and the walls of friends’ homes. Meanwhile, she had an affair with Gerald Brenan, who was an old army friend of Ralph Partridge.

Brenan had moved to southern Spain, where the three of them visited him (a visit he describes in South from Granada). Following this she developed a lengthy correspondence with him. The affair lasted for years, and it was painful for both of them – particularly Brenan. In 1923 she met Henrietta Bingham, the daughter of the American Ambassador to the Court of St. James. Carrington actively pursued Henrietta and they subsequently became lovers. The relationship was also another ménage à trois, since Henrietta had previously been Strachey’s lover.

Dora Carrington biography

Yes – that’s Dora Carrington

The following year Strachey purchased the lease to Ham Spray House near Hungerford in Wiltshire. Carrington, Strachey, and Partridge lived there from 1924 until 1932. Her role there was to take care of the domestic chores, care for Strachey, and decorate the house. Her decision is ironic given her early rebellion against traditional roles for women in her day.

The decision might have also robbed her of time for her own art, though by her own account she was only happy when domestically settled. During 1925, Carrington met Julia Strachey, Lytton’s niece and a novelist who had once been a Parisian model and an art student at the Slade. Julia frequently visited Ham Spray, and though she was married to Stephen Tomlin, she briefly became another of Carrington’s lovers.

In 1926 Ralph Partridge started an affair with Frances Marshall, and went to live with her in London. This more or less (but not formally) ended his marriage to Carrington, although he continued to visit her most weekends.

In 1928 Carrington met Bernard (‘Beakus’) Penrose, a friend of Partridge’s and the younger brother of the artist Roland Penrose. She experienced renewed creativity while she had an affair with him, and collaborated with him on the making of three films. However, he wanted Carrington to make an exclusive commitment to him, a demand she refused because she could not end her relationship with Strachey. The affair, her last one with a man, ended badly when Carrington became pregnant and chose to have an abortion.

In November 1931 Strachey became violently ill and in late December he took a turn for the worse. Doctors were unable to correctly diagnose the problem, and in fact he had stomach cancer. Carrington attempted suicide by shutting herself in the garage with the car running, but Partridge rescued her and she recovered enough to spend the last few days of Strachey’s life taking her turn nursing him.

He died in January after seventeen years of living with her. She became depressed, borrowed a gun from a neighbour, and shot herself. She was found before she died and Ralph Partridge, Frances Marshall, and David Garnett arrived at Ham Spray House in time to say good-bye. She was just short of her thirty-ninth birthday.


Bloomsbury Group – web links

Bloomsbury Group - web links Hogarth Press first editions
Annotated gallery of original first edition book jacket covers from the Hogarth Press, featuring designs by Vanessa Bell, Roger Fry, and others.

Bloomsbury Group - web links The Omega Workshops
A brief history of Roger Fry’s experimental Omega Workshops, which had a lasting influence on interior design in post First World War Britain.

Bloomsbury Group - web links The Bloomsbury Group and War
An essay on the largely pacifist and internationalist stance taken by Bloomsbury Group members towards the First World War.

Bloomsbury Group web links Tate Gallery Archive Journeys: Bloomsbury
Mini web site featuring photos, paintings, a timeline, sub-sections on the Omega Workshops, Roger Fry, and Duncan Grant, and biographical notes.

Bloomsbury Group - web links Bloomsbury: Books, Art and Design
Exhibition of paintings, designs, and ceramics at Toronto University featuring Hogarth Press, Vanessa Bell, Dora Carrington, Quentin Bell, and Stephen Tomlin.

Bloomsbury Group - web links Blogging Woolf
A rich enthusiast site featuring news of events, exhibitions, new book reviews, relevant links, study resources, and anything related to Bloomsbury and Virginia Woolf

Bloomsbury Group - web links Hyper-Concordance to Virginia Woolf
Search the texts of all Woolf’s major works, and track down phrases, quotes, and even individual words in their original context.

Bloomsbury Group - web links A Mrs Dalloway Walk in London
An annotated description of Clarissa Dalloway’s walk from Westminster to Regent’s Park, with historical updates and a bibliography.

Bloomsbury Group - web links Women’s History Walk in Bloomsbury
Annotated tour of literary and political homes in Bloomsbury, including Gordon Square, University College, Bedford Square, Doughty Street, and Tavistock Square.

Bloomsbury Group - web links Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain
News of events, regular bulletins, study materials, publications, and related links. Largely the work of Virginia Woolf specialist Stuart N. Clarke.

Bloomsbury Group - web links BBC Audio Essay – A Eulogy to Words
A charming sound recording of a BBC radio talk broadcast in 1937 – accompanied by a slideshow of photographs of Virginia Woolf.

Bloomsbury Group - web links A Family Photograph Albumn
Leslie Stephens’ collection of family photographs which became known as the Mausoleum Book, collected at Smith College – Massachusetts.

Bloomsbury Group - web links Bloomsbury at Duke University
A collection of book jacket covers, Fry’s Twelve Woodcuts, Strachey’s ‘Elizabeth and Essex’.

© Roy Johnson 2000-2014


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Filed Under: Art, Biography, Bloomsbury Group Tagged With: Art, Biography, Bloomsbury Group, Cultural history, Dora Carrington

Dorothy Brett biography

December 12, 2010 by Roy Johnson

painter, socialite, Bloomsbury group member

Dorothy Brett biographyDorothy Eugenie Brett was born November 10, 1883. She was the eldest daughter of the second Viscount Esher, Reginald Baliol Brett, who was the Liberal MP for Penryn and Falmouth. Her mother was Eleanor van de Weyer, the daughter of the Belgian ambassador to the court of St. James and a close advisor to Queen Victoria. She was called ‘Doll’ by her family, and like many upper class children of the Victorian era she was raised separately from her parents, receiving little formal education. She went to dancing classes with members of the royal family at Windsor Castle under the supervision of Queen Victoria, but had little contact with other children her own age, apart from her two elder bothers and younger sister sylvia who scandalised the family by becoming the Ranee of Sarawak.

This state of being secluded persisted until she was in her early twenties, and was exacerbated by a progressive deafness following an attack of appendicitis. Her attempts to make relationships were met with disapproval by her parents. She was packed off to their summer house in Scotland. But whilst she was there some of her drawings were seen by Sir Ian Hamilton, a friend of the family who persuaded her parents to send her to art school.

She was accepted into the Slade School on a provisional basis in the autumn of 1910, which turned out to be good timing and a propitious move. She was taught by Henry Tonks, and came into contact with a talented coterie of fellow students who like her were throwing off the shackles of the Victorian age and forging a new form of Bohemianism. She met and befriended Dora Carrington, Mark Gertler, David Bomberg, Stanley Spencer, and Isaac Rosenberg. It was a tradition at the school to refer to everyone by their surname, so she became ‘Brett’ to everyone but her family, in the same way that Dora Carrington was addressed simply as ‘Carrington’.

Dora Carrington, Barabara Hiles, and Dorothy Brett

Carrington, Hiles, Brett

The two young women also became pace-setters so far as their personal appearance was concerned. They wore unflattering workmen’s clothes, had their hair cut short in pudding basin styles, and became known as ‘cropheads’. Her father set her up in her own studio – partly to help her develop her artistic career, and partly to move her out of the family home in Mayfair, where servants had begun to complain about the company she kept.

She did well at the Slade, completed its four year programme, and in 1914 won first prize for figure painting. Through her friendship with Mark Gertler, she met Augustus John and then Ottoline Morrell. Through this connection she was invited to the famous weekend parties at Garsington Manor in Oxfordshire where she mixed with Leonard and Virginia Woolf, Lytton Strachey, Clive Bell, and Duncan Grant. She also formed two relationship which were to have an important influence on the later part of her life.

The first of these was with the equally Bohemian writer Katherine Mansfield, through whom she met John Middleton Murry. All of them moved in to share a flat in Gower Street she was renting from John Maynard Keynes. She was a witness at Mansfield’s marriage to Murray in 1918. This did not prevent Murry from maintaining a flirtatious relationship with her, which later turned into an affair to which she gave way as a ‘forty year old virgin’. It resulted for her in pregnancy and a miscarriage.

The other important influence on her life was D.H.Lawrence who she met with his wife Frieda at the Garsington weekends along with the central figures of the Bloomsbury Group. She developed something of a crush on Ottoline which led to a voluminous correspondence but very little else. In 1919 Brett’s parents set her up in a house in Hampstead and gave her an annual allowance in an effort to push her into independence. But it was Lawrence’s restless search for a new way of living which finally drew her into his powerful orbit for good.

Dorothy Brett biography

Dorothy Brett – “Umbrellas”

Lawrence had visited North America and came back to London preaching the virtues of a new artists’ community he was proposing to set up in New Mexico (which he had chosen for its climate because of his tuberculosis). Many of the Bloomsberries expressed an interest in the idea, but in the end only Brett sailed with the Lawrences in the spring of 1924.

They settled in Taos, New Mexico as part of the artistic colony established by the wealthy American patroness Mabel Dodge Luhan. She surrounded herself with writers and artists such as Willa Cather, Georgia O’Keeffe. Brett formed a strong bond with Frieda Lawrence and Mabel Dodge Luhan (both strong women) to the extent that they were known as ‘The Three Fates’ in Taos social circles.

Brett painted the people and buildings of native America in a style which was simple, with an almost religious sense, producing what are perhaps her best known series of paintings, called ‘The Ceremonials’. There were rivalries and quarrels amongst the artists. Lawrence eventually left and returned to live in Europe. But Brett stayed on, becoming a United States citizen in 1938. She continued to paint and remained in Taos until she died within a few months of her 94th birthday in 1977. Her work is in the permanent collections of the Museum of New Mexico and the Buffalo Museum of Science, in the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington DC, in the Millicent Rogers Museum and the Harwood Museum of Art, both in Taos, and in the New Mexico Museum of Art, Santa Fe.



Bloomsbury Group – web links

Bloomsbury Group - web links Hogarth Press first editions
Annotated gallery of original first edition book jacket covers from the Hogarth Press, featuring designs by Vanessa Bell, Roger Fry, and others.

Bloomsbury Group - web links The Omega Workshops
A brief history of Roger Fry’s experimental Omega Workshops, which had a lasting influence on interior design in post First World War Britain.

Bloomsbury Group - web links The Bloomsbury Group and War
An essay on the largely pacifist and internationalist stance taken by Bloomsbury Group members towards the First World War.

Bloomsbury Group web links Tate Gallery Archive Journeys: Bloomsbury
Mini web site featuring photos, paintings, a timeline, sub-sections on the Omega Workshops, Roger Fry, and Duncan Grant, and biographical notes.

Bloomsbury Group - web links Bloomsbury: Books, Art and Design
Exhibition of paintings, designs, and ceramics at Toronto University featuring Hogarth Press, Vanessa Bell, Dora Carrington, Quentin Bell, and Stephen Tomlin.

Bloomsbury Group - web links Blogging Woolf
A rich enthusiast site featuring news of events, exhibitions, new book reviews, relevant links, study resources, and anything related to Bloomsbury and Virginia Woolf

Bloomsbury Group - web links Hyper-Concordance to Virginia Woolf
Search the texts of all Woolf’s major works, and track down phrases, quotes, and even individual words in their original context.

Bloomsbury Group - web links A Mrs Dalloway Walk in London
An annotated description of Clarissa Dalloway’s walk from Westminster to Regent’s Park, with historical updates and a bibliography.

Bloomsbury Group - web links Women’s History Walk in Bloomsbury
Annotated tour of literary and political homes in Bloomsbury, including Gordon Square, University College, Bedford Square, Doughty Street, and Tavistock Square.

Bloomsbury Group - web links Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain
News of events, regular bulletins, study materials, publications, and related links. Largely the work of Virginia Woolf specialist Stuart N. Clarke.

Bloomsbury Group - web links BBC Audio Essay – A Eulogy to Words
A charming sound recording of a BBC radio talk broadcast in 1937 – accompanied by a slideshow of photographs of Virginia Woolf.

Bloomsbury Group - web links A Family Photograph Albumn
Leslie Stephens’ collection of family photographs which became known as the Mausoleum Book, collected at Smith College – Massachusetts.

Bloomsbury Group - web links Bloomsbury at Duke University
A collection of book jacket covers, Fry’s Twelve Woodcuts, Strachey’s ‘Elizabeth and Essex’.

© Roy Johnson 2014


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Filed Under: Bloomsbury Group Tagged With: Art, Biography, Bloomsbury Group, Dorothy Brett, Modernism

Duncan Grant & the Bloomsbury Group

July 22, 2009 by Roy Johnson

richly illustrated biography and social study

Duncan Grant came from a privileged upper class family in Scotland where he spent childhood holidays with his cousins the Stracheys (including Lytton Strachey who later became his lover) amidst a family whose eccentric behaviour reads like the events of a PG Wodehouse story. He went to Rugby School with Rupert Brooke and then lived with Lytton Strachey at Lancaster Gate. Duncan Grant and the Bloomsbury Group concentrates on his life and work amidst this illustrious collection of aesthetes.

Duncan Grant & the Bloomsbury GroupDouglas Turnbaugh’s narrative weaves in an out of his many affaires as a young man – Strachey, Arthur Hobhouse, John Maynard Keynes – but also emphasises his hard work in trying to become a successful artist, studying the old masters, copying them, and attending art schools in London and Paris. Grant’s life merged with that of the Bloomsbury set when he took up residence with the Stephens in Gordon Square. He and Keynes lived on the ground floor; Adrian Stephen on the first floor; Virginia Woolf on the second; and Leonard Woolf on the top floor.

He joined the Omega workshop which was organised by Roger Fry, subsequently replacing him as Vanessa Bell’s lover – despite the fact that he was her brother’s lover at the time. Then during the war he was like most of the Bloomsberries a conscientious objector. He became the father of Vanessa Bell’s daughter Angelica, who was passed off as the daughter of Clive Bell – to whom Vanessa was still married.

In the 1920s Vanessa learned to tolerate his affairs with a succession of younger men. In fact the whole family became involved in this sexual ambiguity when Julian Bell, Vanessa’s son, studying at Cambridge, began sleeping with Anthony Blunt – who later turned out to be simultaneously Keeper of the Queen’s pictures and a Soviet spy.

The cruelty of concealing the true identity of Angelica Bell’s father came home to roost in the late 1930s when she discovered the truth, and reacted to it by marrying another of her father’s ex-lover, David Garnett – which caused a rift in the family. [She gives her own account of these events, plus a picture of her Bloomsbury childhood, in Deceived with Kindness.]

In 1946, at the age of 60, he met the young Paul Roche, who was to be the main love of his late life and a serious threat to Vanessa. His work in the immediate post war period was considered unfashionable, but he continued working, mainly on decorative projects and private commissions. In the 1960s and 70s however, his reputation revived and he continued painting and pursuing young men with a remarkable degree of success until his death at the age of ninety-three.

This is a rather uncritical biography, but it captures the spirit of the ages in which Duncan Grant lived quite well, and it is rich in anecdote. The book is generously illustrated with Grant’s work and portraits of the Bloomsberries, and it has a good bibliography. I bought my copy second hand on Amazon to flesh out my collection of Bloomsbury materials, and although it is a little dated it turned out to be really good value.

© Roy Johnson 2002

Duncan Grant Buy the book at Amazon UK

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Douglas Turnbaugh, Duncan Grant and the Bloomsbury group, London: Bloomsbury, 1987, pp.192, ISBN 0747501033


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Duncan Grant biography

September 18, 2009 by Roy Johnson

Bloomsbury painter and interior designer

Duncan Grant - portraitDuncan Grant (full name Duncan James Corrowr Grant) was born in Inverness, Scotland in 1885. He was brought up until the age of nine in India and Burma where his father was posted as an army officer. He returned to England in 1894 to attend school. While at St Paul’s school, London, he was brought up by his uncle and aunt Sir Richard and Lady Strachey (the parents of Lytton Strachey. He was encouraged by his art teacher and also his aunt, who organised private drawing lessons for him. Eventually, he was allowed to follow his desire to become an artist, rather than joining the army as his father wished, and he attended Westminster School of Art in 1902.

Grant’s cousins the Stracheys, with whom he had spent summer holidays as a schoolboy, played an important part in his life during this period. He spent the summer of 1905 with Lytton Strachey, and around the same time Pippa Strachey took Duncan to a meeting of the Friday Club where he first met the artists in the Bloomsbury Group.

At the beginning of 1906 he went to Paris, taking with him a letter of introduction from the French artist Simon Bussy and £100 from an aunt sympathetic to Grant’s artistic interests. He rented an attic room in a cheap hotel and enrolled at Jacques Emile Blanche’s new art school, La Palette. While in Paris he copied paintings in the Louvre.


The Art of Duncan GrantThe Art of Duncan Grant is a visual record of Grant’s easel painting and murals. He also did fabric design, theatre and ballet work, illustration and print-making, and commercial interior decoration. Throughout a long life Duncan Grant continued to experiment with new styles and techniques. This book offers an opportunity to grasp the extent of his achievement.


During his year in Paris, Grant developed a number of other important connections. He met the British artists Wyndham Lewis, Henry Lamb and Augustus John, and made friends with the American writer Gertrude Stein. He was also visited by the newly married Vanessa Bell and her husband Clive Bell, along with Vanessa’s sister Virginia Woolf, and their brother Adrian

Returning to London, Duncan Grant formed relationships over the next few years that were to affect the course of his life and work. In 1908, he became the lover of John Maynard Keynes, a university friend of his cousin Lytton Strachey. They travelled to Italy, Greece, and Turkey, seeing much that would influence Grant’s artistic style.

In 1909 he moved to 21 Fitzroy Square and became a regular visitor at Virginia and Adrian Stephen’s Thursday evening gatherings which formed the nucleus of the Bloomsbury Group. He also became a co-director of the Omega Workshops in 1913, along with Roger Fry and Vanessa Bell. All of them shared an interest in the decorative arts as well painting on canvas.

In 1911 he worked on his first major commission, collaborating with other artists on a series of murals for the refectory of what is now South Bank University. The art critic of The Times thought that his murals Bathing and Football could have a “degenerative influence on the children of the working classes” – though both panels are now in the Tate Gallery.

Duncan Grant and the Bloomsbury GroupFrom 1914 Duncan lived and worked with Vanessa Bell, moving to Charleston with her and his lover David Garnett. Vanessa was married to Clive Bell, but he had moved on to an affair with someone else and only visited at weekends. Despite Grant’s homosexuality, he and Vanessa remained together for fifty years, and they had a daughter Angelica who was born in 1918. Angelica was led to believe that her father was Clive Bell, and she only discovered the truth as an adult. She gives her version of all this in her memoir, Deceived with Kindness where she describes her reaction of marrying her father’s former lover, David Garnett, who was twenty-six years older than her, much to the disapproval of her mother.

Like most of the members of the Bloomsbury group, Grant was a pacifist. In order to be exempted from military service during World War I, he and David Garnett moved to Wissett in the Suffolk countryside to become farm labourers. Although they were at first refused exemption by a tribunal, they appealed and were eventually recognised as conscientious objectors.

He had his first one-man exhibition in 1920 and his work was exhibited regularly until the end of his life. Grant and Bell were in great demand to paint murals and decorations. Duncan Grant enjoyed a reputation as one of the most important British Artists until the late 1930s, after which period the influence of pre-war Bloomsbury was eclipsed by the second world war.

Duncan Grant: A BiographyVanessa and Grant also travelled widely in Europe and spent much of their time living in Cassis in the South of France. After Vanessa Bell’s death he continued painting, dividing his time between Charleston and London and also travelling to Turkey, Morocco and France. The last great love of his life was the poet Paul Roche, whose daughter the actress and artist Mitey Roche he taught to paint. He died of pneumonia at Aldermaston in 1978 at the age of ninety-three.

Francis Spalding’s Duncan Grant: A Biography is the standard account of his life, which stretched from the Victorian age well into the modern era. It is based on his unpublished memoirs, letters and diaries, and it meticulously documents Grant’s daily life, his travels from Seville to Cyprus, and his encounters with everyone from E.M. Forster to Andre Gide and D.H. Lawrence.

Duncan Grant biography Buy the book at Amazon UK
Duncan Grant biography Buy the book at Amazon US


Clive Bell


Bloomsbury Group – web links

Bloomsbury Group - web links Hogarth Press first editions
Annotated gallery of original first edition book jacket covers from the Hogarth Press, featuring designs by Vanessa Bell, Roger Fry, and others.

Bloomsbury Group - web links The Omega Workshops
A brief history of Roger Fry’s experimental Omega Workshops, which had a lasting influence on interior design in post First World War Britain.

Bloomsbury Group - web links The Bloomsbury Group and War
An essay on the largely pacifist and internationalist stance taken by Bloomsbury Group members towards the First World War.

Bloomsbury Group web links Tate Gallery Archive Journeys: Bloomsbury
Mini web site featuring photos, paintings, a timeline, sub-sections on the Omega Workshops, Roger Fry, and Duncan Grant, and biographical notes.

Bloomsbury Group - web links Bloomsbury: Books, Art and Design
Exhibition of paintings, designs, and ceramics at Toronto University featuring Hogarth Press, Vanessa Bell, Dora Carrington, Quentin Bell, and Stephen Tomlin.

Bloomsbury Group - web links Blogging Woolf
A rich enthusiast site featuring news of events, exhibitions, new book reviews, relevant links, study resources, and anything related to Bloomsbury and Virginia Woolf

Bloomsbury Group - web links Hyper-Concordance to Virginia Woolf
Search the texts of all Woolf’s major works, and track down phrases, quotes, and even individual words in their original context.

Bloomsbury Group - web links A Mrs Dalloway Walk in London
An annotated description of Clarissa Dalloway’s walk from Westminster to Regent’s Park, with historical updates and a bibliography.

Bloomsbury Group - web links Women’s History Walk in Bloomsbury
Annotated tour of literary and political homes in Bloomsbury, including Gordon Square, University College, Bedford Square, Doughty Street, and Tavistock Square.

Bloomsbury Group - web links Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain
News of events, regular bulletins, study materials, publications, and related links. Largely the work of Virginia Woolf specialist Stuart N. Clarke.

Bloomsbury Group - web links BBC Audio Essay – A Eulogy to Words
A charming sound recording of a BBC radio talk broadcast in 1937 – accompanied by a slideshow of photographs of Virginia Woolf.

Bloomsbury Group - web links A Family Photograph Albumn
Leslie Stephens’ collection of family photographs which became known as the Mausoleum Book, collected at Smith College – Massachusetts.

Bloomsbury Group - web links Bloomsbury at Duke University
A collection of book jacket covers, Fry’s Twelve Woodcuts, Strachey’s ‘Elizabeth and Essex’.

© Roy Johnson 2000-2014


More on biography
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Filed Under: Bloomsbury Group Tagged With: Art, Biography, Bloomsbury Group, Duncan Grant

E.M.Forster – biographical notes

September 27, 2009 by Roy Johnson

E.M.Forster - portrait1879. E.M.Forster (Edward Morgan) born in London. His father dies the following year.

1887. Inherits £8,000 from his great-aunt Marianne Thornton.

1890. Educated at private schools in Eastbourne and Tonbridge Wells, where he was very unhappy and developed a lasting dislike of the public school system.

1897. Studies classics and history at King’s College, Cambridge. Influenced by philosopher G.E. Moore and the notion that the purpose of life is to love, create, to contemplate beauty in art, and to cultivate friendships. Becomes a member of the Apostles, which was later to form the nucleus of the Bloomsbury Group. He was a contemporary of Leonard Woolf, Lytton Strachey, Thoby Stephen, and Maynard Keynes.

1901. One year’s tour of Italy and Austria with his mother. Begins writing seriously.

1902. Teaches at the Working Men’s College and Cambridge Local Lectures Board (extra-mural department).

1904. Begins contributing stories to the Independent Review, launched by a group of Cambridge friends, including G.M.Trevelyan. ‘The Story of a Panic’ his first published work.

1905. Where Angels Fear to Tread is published. Spends some time in Germany as tutor to the children of Countess Elizabeth von Arnim (first cousin of Katherine Mansfield).

1906. Works as a private tutor to Syed Ross Masood, a colonial Indian patriot, for whom he develops a passionate attachment.

1907. The Longest Journey published. Forster is a member of the Bloomsbury Group and a friend of Virginia Woolf, Leonard Woolf, Lytton Strachey, and Roger Fry.

1908. A Room with a View.


E.M.Forster: A Life is a readable and well illustrated biography by P.N. Furbank. This book has been much praised for the sympathetic understanding Nick Furbank brings to Forster’s life and work. It is also a very scholarly book, with plenty of fascinating details of the English literary world during Forster’s surprisingly long life. It has become the ‘standard’ biography, and it is very well written too. Highly recommended.
 


1910. Howard’s End: his first major success, which established his reputation as a writer of importance.

1911. Publishes a collection of rather light and whimsical short stories, The Celestial Omnibus.

1912. Visits India and travels with Masood. Begins writing A Passage to India.

1913. Visits Edward Carpenter (an early evangelist for gay rights) and as a result begins writing Maurice, a novel about homosexual love which is not published until 1971, after Forster’s death.

1915. Begins working for the Red Cross in Alexandria.

1919. Returns to England.

1921. Second visit to India. Becomes private secretary to the Maharajah of Dewas.

1924. A Passage to India widely acclaimed. But gives up writing novels because he felt he could not write openly and honestly about sexual relations.

1927. Elected Fellow of King’s College, Cambridge. Gives the Clark lectures which are published as Aspects of the Novel.

1934. First president of the National Council for Civil Liberties.

1936. Abinger Harvest: a collection of his essays and reviews.

1945. Death of his mother. Elected Honorary Fellow at King’s and takes up entitlement to live there.

1947. Lecture tours in the United States.

1969. Awarded the Order of Merit.

1970. Dies in the home of friends.

© Roy Johnson 2009


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Eminent Victorians

July 19, 2009 by Roy Johnson

iconoclastic biographies of nineteenth-century heros

This is a book which marked a decisive step into the modern world of the twentieth century, and a clean break with the Victorian and Edwardian attitudes which preceded it. Lytton Strachey was hardly known when he published the book in 1918: afterwards, he was almost as notorious as Oscar Wilde. It’s a group of biographical studies – of Cardinal Manning (1802-1892), Florence Nightingale (1820-1910), Dr Arnold of Rugby School (1795-1842), and General Gordon (1833-1885) in which Strachey overturns all the pious hagiographic work of his forebears and portrays these icons of Victorian life as ordinary beings locked in the social context of their age.

Eminent VictoriansHis sketches are witty, pungent, and very elegantly expressed put-downs which punctured the blind optimism of the age which had led up to the disasters of the first world war. Well, not exactly ordinary. These were people who felt they had a messianic duty to ‘serve’ the public, and all of them were fuelled by religious fervour. If there is one theme which unites these portraits it is the intellectual contortions and the exhausting spiritual struggles these people made in trying to reconcile contradictions in their religious belief system – in this case Christianity.

And Strachey is not blind to their good qualities. He has a certain admiration for Manning’s soul-searching as he wavered on the edge of Protestantism and Catholicism. His account of Nightingale in the Crimea is largely a critique of the War Office’s blundering and obstructiveness. And General Gordon is shown as almost a scapegoat for Britain’s imperialistic equivocations.

It has to be said that by modern standards, Strachey is hopelessly unrigorous as a historian. He plagiarises his principal sources, fails to cite his quotations accurately; gets his dates wrong; invents ‘facts’; and bends details to suit his narrative purpose. But the stories he creates have tremendous drive and interest.

The chapter on Cardinal Manning is more than just a potted biography for instance. Strachey deals with power struggles in the politics of ecclesiastical preferment and in particular the rivalry between Manning and Cardinal Newman. He’s very interesting on the significance of the Oxford Movement (for Roman Catholicism) in relation to the State in nineteenth-century Britain.

In the case of Florence Nightingale Strachey’s purpose is less to do with individual biography and much more to offer a scathing critique of government and military mismanagement in its conduct of medical support during the Crimean war. Only when the war ends, and she spends a further fifty years of her long life engaged in Good Works and social reforms does he focus on her personal life.

His targets are all well chosen, representing as they do Church, public service, Empire, and reforming social zeal. In the case of Thomas (Dr) Arnold, he shows the example of someone who attempted to re-shape the conduct of Rugby School in a form which others would follow. This regime included a curriculum of dead languages plus Christianity, the complete exclusion of any sciences, and an authoritarian regime of discipline with corporal punishment administered by a cadre of elite sixth-formers and the head himself for serious cases. But as Strachey points out

so far as the actual machinery of education was concerned, Dr Arnold not only failed to effect a change, but deliberately adhered to the old system. The monastic and literary conceptions of education, which had their roots in the Middle Ages, had been accepted and strengthened at the revival of Learning, he adopted almost without hesitation. Under him, the public school remained, in essentials, a conventional establishment, devoted to the teaching of Greek and Latin grammar.

Much of the same Christian evangelicism is present in the life of General Gordon (and it takes almost as a matter of course an anti-Semitic and anti-Muslim element). Strachey produces a narrative which is amazingly contemporary in revealing the connections between government, military, and the press which resulted in General Gordon being sent on a mission to ‘save’ Khartoum – only to find himself bogged down in an imperialistic quagmire which resulted in him paying with his life, waiting for a rescuing expeditionary force which arrived just forty-eight hours too late.

At any rate, it had all ended very happily – in a glorious slaughter of twenty thousand Arabs, a vast addition to the British Empire, and a step in the peerage for Sir Evelyn Baring.

© Roy Johnson 2009

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Lytton Strachey, Eminent Victorians, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009, pp.336, ISBN 019955501X


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Frances Partridge

January 15, 2018 by Roy Johnson

Bloomsbury socialite, diarist, and translator

Frances Partridge (1900-2004) was a fringe member of the Bloomsbury Group, but someone who outlived all the other major figures. She knew Lytton Strachey and Dora Carrington, and she married Ralph Partridge after his first wife’s suicide. She also became a prolific diarist and a translator of novels from the original Spanish.

Frances Partridge

She was born Francis Marshall into a prosperous upper middle class family that already had its roots in Bloomsbury. Her father was a friend of Sir Leslie Stephen, and the family lived in a grand home at 28 Bedford Square, with the Asquiths and the literary critic Walter Raleigh as neighbours. There was also a second home in Hindhead, Surrey to which the family transferred in 1908.

At school she befriended Julia Strachey, through whose family she became acquainted with the Stephens – Vanessa Bell, Virginia Woolf and their bothers. Both Julia and Frances transferred to the prestigious (and very expensive) Beadales public school by the start of the war in 1914.

Frances developed an interest in philosophy and actually met the author of her favourite textbook, Bertrand Russell. In the non-conformist ethos of the school, she became a pacifist, which given the jingoist fervour during the years of the First World War, was quite a radical attitude.

In 1918 she went to the all-female Newnham College Cambridge, where women students studied the same courses as men but could not be awarded degrees. [Cambridge was the last university in England to give women equal status in 1948.]

She studied English under I.A. Richards. Later she switched from English to philosophy, and eventually met Ludwig Wittgenstein who was teaching there at the time. She finished undergraduate studies with a 2:I and the same year her father died, leaving her a large inheritance, though she did not go to his funeral.

Her first job was as assistant in the bookshop run by David Garnett, who had become her brother-in-law by marrying her sister Ray (Rachel). The business was badly run, but was patronised by senior members of the Bloomsbury Group and its various connections, with all of whom Frances became friendly.

The closest of these connections were with Dora Carrington and her husband Ralph Partridge, who lived in a curious menage a trois with Lytton Strachey in a country mill house in Tidmarsh (Berkshire). This was a trio which Carrington was in the dangerous process of turning into an even more complex quartet by having an affair with Ralph Partridge’s best friend Gerald Brenan at the same time.

Frances Partridge biography

Given the flagrant bed-hopping of the people with whom she was mixing, Frances’ behaviour seems more like that of a professional virgin. She kept three men dangling at once and even in her mid-twenties thought it would ruin her reputation if she was known to be alone in Paris at the same time as Ralph Partridge.

Eventually she went on a holiday alone with Partridge to Spain, relinquished her virginity, and on return expected him to show his commitment by setting up home with her. Instead, he behaved like the traditional cad who wants the pleasure of a mistress but pleads he cannot possibly leave his wife.

She kept her two other male admirers waiting whilst he negotiated with his housemates Lytton and Dora. After a lot of agonising they all finally reached a compromise. Frances and Ralph moved into James and Alix Strachey’s empty flat in Gordon Square, from which Ralph was free to visit his wife at weekends.

This move put Frances right into the heart of Bloomsbury – geographically, socially, and intellectually. But a sour note was introduced into the mix when after a while Lytton announced that they wanted to see less of her.

Social and emotional tensions continued to smoulder between the four individuals, but matters were eventually resolved by a tragic if very symmetrical sequence of events. First there was sudden death of Lytton Strachey from stomach cancer. Following this was Carrington’s reaction to it when she committed suicide. Ralph was suddenly left a widower with a substantial inheritance from his dead wife and ownership of the country house they had bought at Ham Spray (near Reading).

The following year Frances and Ralph had a low key marriage, and she had a miscarriage. These events were followed by the first of Ralph’s many extra-marital affairs, which Frances dealt with as if she were suffering from a headache or a heavy cold.

Her wifely patience was subsequently rewarded with the birth of her son Burgo who was immediately put into a nursery in an annex to the house and raised by hired help. The parents went off for an extended holiday with Gerald Brenan to Malaga.

In the period that followed, the Spanish Civil War and Hitler’s incursions in middle-Europe put a strain on the political beliefs and the internationalism of the Bloomsbury Group – but Frances remained adamantly pacifist. For her, nothing could be worse than war.

During the war itself she seemed to suffer nothing worse than a lack of domestic help. Staff left to join the war effort, and she couldn’t cook. Fortunately, there were still oysters and plovers at the Ivy restaurant on excursions into town.

In the after-war years there were problems with her son Burgo who had persistent fears that his parents were dead (which was psychologically understandable). There was a failed project to write an encyclopedia of English botany. Both Frances and Ralph lived on inherited wealth, and neither of them had proper jobs – but Ralph eventually wrote a history of Broadmoor Prison, whilst Frances took up the task of indexing the English edition of Freud’s complete works, which was published by the Hogarth Press.

In 1950 Ralph Partridge died of a heart attack. Frances subsequently, but with great emotional difficulty, sold the house at Ham Spray and moved to a small flat in Belgravia. Her young son Burgo married the even younger daughter of David Garnett. This created a third generational link in the complex matrix of Bloomsbury inter-connections, but less than a year later the young man was dead, killed by an aortic aneurysm.

Frances dealt with these personal losses by a combination of writing and travel. She worked as a translator (including the novels of Alejo Carpentier) and visited Gerald Brenan in Spain on a fairly regular basis. She also spent a lot of time looking after Julia Strachey, who was falling victim to dementia.

In the years that followed, as one of its oldest surviving members, she became an unofficial but certainly unelected guardian of Bloomsbury reputations – most noticeably that of her former husband Ralph. She wanted to protect all her old friends from misrepresentation and vulgarisation. She had battles with the BBC and Ken Russell, but even more with Gerald Brenan, who was in the process of writing his autobiography.

In her eighties she entered on an amazingly productive phase – three books of memoirs in as many years, including the best-selling Love in Bloomsbury, In fact the success of this venture led to a spate of publications over the next decade.

She lived to be over a hundred years old, outliving her exact contemporary the Queen Mother, but as she characteristically insisted, ‘living alone, rather than being waited on hand and foot’.

© Roy Johnson 2018

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Anne Chisholm, Frances Partridge: The Biography, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2009, pp.402, ISBN: 0297646737


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Garsington Revisited

July 26, 2017 by Roy Johnson

Ottoline Morrell – her biography, house, and love affairs

Garsington Revisited is an updated and enlarged version of a study originally published in 1975 with the title Ottoline: The Life of Lady Ottoline Morrell. The book’s original chapters have been revised in the light of recent research and supplemented by vignettes of how the book came to be written in the first place.

Garsington Revisited

The main outlines of Ottoline Morrell’s life are fairly well known. She came from the aristocratic Cavendish-Bentinck family and was raised at Welbeck Abbey in Nottinghamshire. Although the family were upper class, they aspired to be even more so, and artificial titles were created for all its members on the recommendation of Benjamin Disraeli.

Ottoline was a rather lonely and introverted child. She felt out of place in the aristocratic milieu she inhabited. She did not mix easily, and by the time she was a young woman, being almost six feet tall, she felt herself something of an outsider.

The first of many influential men in her life was the Archbishop of York, though his wife was not enthusiastic about their friendship. He encouraged her to try further education, but two attempts at Edinburgh and Oxford came to nothing. In 1896 she made her first (chaperoned) visit to Italy, which opened her eyes to visual beauty and a sense of personal liberty – very much in the spirit of E.M. Forster’s Where Angels Fear to Tread (1902) and A Room with a View.

She was attracted to older men – the next two being the future prime minister Herbert Asquith and the Swedish physician Axel Munthe, to whom she lost her virginity. But the first serious contender for the hand of the Duke of Portland’s sister was a middle-class lawyer from a Midlands brewing family – Philip Morrell. Their wedding took place in 1907, and they remained married for the rest of their lives – despite what was to happen in the years that followed.

She assisted her husband in his political ambitions with the Liberal Party – which was then considered outrageously radical. She also started the first of her Thursday night ‘at home’ soirées in Bedford Square. Guests included a mixture of politicians and artists – Asquith and Max Beerbohm, Ramsay MacDonald and Henry James.

A year after her marriage she met the artist Augustus John and rapidly began an affair with him. Around this time she also met and befriended Virginia Woolf, Lytton Strachey, and other members of the Bloomsbury Group who had their own ‘at homes’ in nearby Fitzroy Square. She also met the art critic Roger Fry (who became one of her many occasional lovers) and began to patronise young artists such as Jacob Epstein and Duncan Grant.

Augustus John’s mistress Dorelia sought to reclaim her position as dominant female by introducing Ottoline to the painter Henry Lamb – and the strategy worked. Ottoline went on to have a protracted dalliance with Lamb. When she took him to her country cottage in Oxford, this attracted the attention of Lytton Strachey, who had also fallen in love with Lamb.

In 1911, whilst her husband Philip was away in his new constituency seat of Burnley, she entertained Bertrand Russell to dinner – an evening that went on until until 4.00 am and ended in a burst of mutual passion. They agreed to reveal the affair to their respective spouses, both of whom reluctantly agreed to tolerate the situation so long as it was kept secret.

Garsington Revisited

Garsington Manor

All this took place at a time when the possibility of divorce was much more difficult, and even the threat of its being made public was enough to end a (man’s) career. Ottoline did not make her problems any easier by continuing her relationship with Henry Lamb at the same time.

The affair with Russell rumbled on, despite their fear of a public scandal. The social turbulence was eased somewhat by Russell establishing a love-nest apartment around the corner from the British Museum in the appropriately named Russell Chambers.

Meanwhile the Ballets Russes came and went, Russell’s latest book was savaged by his star pupil Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Philip Morrell bought the lease on Garsington Manor, a Jacobean house outside Oxford. These events were then punctuated by the onset of the First World War.

Because of their internationalist sympathies, the Bloomsbury Group was largely against the war and gave help to people who became conscientious objectors. Meanwhile the English monarchy was hurriedly changing its name from Saxe-Coburg to Windsor. But Ottoline’s ‘at homes’ continued, adding Mark Gertler and Dora Carrington to the regular guest list

She also invited D.H. Lawrence to stay in a cottage in the grounds at Garsington. Russell and Lawrence struck up a highly charged friendship – which predictably ended in tears and Russell feeling close to suicide. It is well known that Ottoline showered Lawrence with practical support, gifts, and money – all of which he repaid by satirising her as Hermione Roddice in his next novel Women in Love. This caused a rift between them that was never properly healed.

Eventually Russell grew more distant from Ottoline, but consoled himself by starting an affair with T.S. Eliot’s wife Vivienne. Garsington and Bloomsbury in general were busy arguing against universal conscription when it was introduced in 1916.

The following year was a bad one for Ottoline. She finally separated herself from Russell, who by then had moved on to an affair with the actress Lady Constance Malleson. Then Ottoline learned that her husband Philip had not one but two mistresses, both of whom were pregnant. He broke the news to her whilst she was in a nursing home. Ottoline was devastated by the news: she could not understand how her husband could violate their marriage by committing adultery.

She sought consolation with her new enthusiasm Siegfried Sassoon, seemingly unaware that he was primarily homosexual. Then she became embroiled with Middleton Murry and Katherine Mansfield, and added Aldous Huxley to her list of slavish live-in friends.

In 1918 Russell was sent to jail for his pacifist views, and Lytton Strachey became a best-selling author with the publication of Eminent Victorians. Shortly afterwards Ottoline took up as occasional lover a young village stonemason working on the Garsington estate

In 1921 her protégé Aldous Huxley published em>Chrome Yellow, a satirical novel that lampooned Ottoline, her husband, and her Garsington friends, all of whom he had lived amongst – rent free. It was another cruel case of betrayal that led to a long-unhealed social rift. Nevertheless Ottoline continued to take an interest in her friends’ welfare and their often problematic marriages.

As the 1920s wore on the upkeep of Garsington became more costly, and Philip Morrell had been presented with a demand that he pay for the education of his two illegitimate sons. So, Philip and Ottoline elected to sell up and go back to London. They moved into what Ottoline described as ‘the dearest little doll’s house’ at 10 Gower Street.

Life there was more subdued, though she still employed five full time staff. When her old friend and antagonist Lawrence died, it was Philip Morrell who became legal advisor to Frieda Lawrence in her battle with the family as they contested his will. She won, but only after a long struggle.

In 1936 Ottoline lost two of her close friends. Lytton Strachey died of stomach cancer, and as a result his soul mate Dora Carrington (who was married to Ralph Partridge) shot herself. Sensing that the end of an era was approaching, Ottoline began writing her Memoirs. Despite failing health however, she found new protégés in Graham Greene and Stephen Spender. As her health failed she put her entire trust in a personal physician who treated her with a controversial new drug Prontosil. It killed her, and shortly afterwards he committed suicide.

Garsington Manor was taken over in 1981 by the Ingrams family who made the estate available as an annual centre for operas which were staged in the famous gardens that Ottoline had created. Complaints about noise were eventually made by local residents, and the opera festival was transferred to the nearby Getty-owned Wormsley Park.

The basic materials for this lengthy and thoroughly researched biography are the memoirs and the huge amount of correspondence that has been made available in recent years since interest in ‘The Bloomsbury Group’ became culturally fashionable. Sandra Dorroch offers a bibliography, an index, and a meticulous annotation of her sources; but ultimately this is an amateur work – in the best sense of that term. It is a labour of love rather than a professional biography. For instance, despite the critical apparatus, you would not know from this account that Lady Ottoline only took two baths a year.

© Roy Johnson 2017

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Sandra Jobson Darroch, Garsington Revisited, John Libbey Publishing, 2017, pp.446, ISBN: 0861967372


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Gerald Brenan biography

September 17, 2009 by Roy Johnson

his life, writings, and adventures

Gerald Brenan biographyGerald Brenan (1894-1987) was born in Malta, the son of an English army officer. After spending some of his childhood in South Africa and India, he grew up in an isolated Cotswold village. He studied at Radley College and then the military academy at Sandhurst. Travel and adventure were to be his way of life, and at sixteen he ran away from home. His aim was to reach Central Asia but the outbreak of the Balkan War and shortage of money caused him to return to England. He studied to enter the Indian Police (as did his near-contemporary George Orwell) but on the outbreak of the First World War, he joined the army. He spent over two years on the Western Front, reaching the rank of captain and winning a Military Cross and a Croix de Guerre.

Following the end of the war, his fellow officer and friend Ralph Partridge introduced him to the fabled Bloomsbury Group. It was through Partridge that Brenan met Lytton Strachey, Dora Carrington, and Virginia Woolf. As soon as he was released from military service he packed a rucksack and left England aboard a ship bound for Spain. He was disillusioned with the way of life in England and with the stifling social and sexual hypocrisies of British bourgeois society. He rebelled against becoming part of it and, being a romantic and adventurer, resolved to seek a more breathable atmosphere in which to live.

He also wanted to educate himself and become a writer. As he records in his best known travel memoir, South from Granada, he felt ashamed that his public school upbringing had left him with a very poor education. He shipped 2,000 books out to his chosen destination – an area deep in Andalucia known as ‘La Alpujarra’.


South from GranadaSouth from Granada is a classic in which Brenan describes setting up home in a remote Spanish village in the 1920s. He has a marvellous grasp of geography; he captures the rugged atmosphere of the region; and he has a particularly detailed knowledge of botany. Local characters and customs are vividly recounted. Bloomsbury enthusiasts will be delighted his by hilarious accounts of visits made by Lytton Strachey and Virginia Woolf under very difficult conditions, as well as a meeting with Roger Fry in Almeria.


Ralph Partridge and Dora Carrington, recently married, also visited him with Lytton Strachey in 1920, and Carrington’s fondness for Brenan is thought to have started on this trip. She carried on an extensive correspondence with Brenan for the next several years and in 1922 they had a brief affair, which was rapidly discovered by Partridge. There was a year of silence between the three, before reconciliation took place and the often-stormy friendship continued for the remainder of their lives.

In 1930 he married the American poetess Gamel Woolsey. In 1934 the Brenans left Spain and were unable to return until 1953, partly because of the Spanish civil war. During the Second World War he was an Air Raid Warden and a Home Guard. They spent this time in Aldbourne and Brenan expressed his feelings of exile from Spain by completing three major works on Spanish life and literature. On his return to Spain he began a series of autobiographical works, including South from Granada, A Life of One’s Own, and A Personal Record.


The Spanish LabyrinthThe Spanish Labyrinth has become the classic account of the background to the Spanish Civil War. It has all the vividness of Brenan’s personal experiences and intelligent insights. He tries to see the issues in Spanish politics objectively, whilst bearing witness to the deep involvement which is the only possible source of much of this richly detailed account. As a literary figure on the fringe of the Bloomsbury Group, Gerald Brenan lends to this narrative an engaging personal style that has become familiar to many thousands of readers over the decades since it was first published


After the death of his wife in 1968, a young English student of the poetry of the Spanish saint – St. John of the Cross – joined Gerald as his secretary and companion. This young lady Lynda Jane Nicholson Price remained with him for 14 years. In the later part of his life he was confined to an old people’s home in Aldermaston, but a group of his Spanish friends ‘kidnapped’ him and took him back to what they regarded as his spiritual home, just outside Malaga. He died on January 19, 1987 while in the hands of the Spanish Medical Services who had undertaken to care for him. He was acclaimed for his services to Spanish literature, buried in Malaga, and a plaque dedicated to his work was fixed to the house where he had lived in Yegen. It reads:

“In this house for a period of seven years [1920-1934] lived the British Hispanist GERALD BRENAN, who universalised the name of Yegen and the customs and traditions of La Alpujarra. The Town Hall, grateful, dedicates this plaque.” YEGEN, 3 JANUARY, 1982


Gerald Brenan biography


Bloomsbury Group – web links

Bloomsbury Group - web links Hogarth Press first editions
Annotated gallery of original first edition book jacket covers from the Hogarth Press, featuring designs by Vanessa Bell, Roger Fry, and others.

Bloomsbury Group - web links The Omega Workshops
A brief history of Roger Fry’s experimental Omega Workshops, which had a lasting influence on interior design in post First World War Britain.

Bloomsbury Group - web links The Bloomsbury Group and War
An essay on the largely pacifist and internationalist stance taken by Bloomsbury Group members towards the First World War.

Bloomsbury Group web links Tate Gallery Archive Journeys: Bloomsbury
Mini web site featuring photos, paintings, a timeline, sub-sections on the Omega Workshops, Roger Fry, and Duncan Grant, and biographical notes.

Bloomsbury Group - web links Bloomsbury: Books, Art and Design
Exhibition of paintings, designs, and ceramics at Toronto University featuring Hogarth Press, Vanessa Bell, Dora Carrington, Quentin Bell, and Stephen Tomlin.

Bloomsbury Group - web links Blogging Woolf
A rich enthusiast site featuring news of events, exhibitions, new book reviews, relevant links, study resources, and anything related to Bloomsbury and Virginia Woolf

Bloomsbury Group - web links Hyper-Concordance to Virginia Woolf
Search the texts of all Woolf’s major works, and track down phrases, quotes, and even individual words in their original context.

Bloomsbury Group - web links A Mrs Dalloway Walk in London
An annotated description of Clarissa Dalloway’s walk from Westminster to Regent’s Park, with historical updates and a bibliography.

Bloomsbury Group - web links Women’s History Walk in Bloomsbury
Annotated tour of literary and political homes in Bloomsbury, including Gordon Square, University College, Bedford Square, Doughty Street, and Tavistock Square.

Bloomsbury Group - web links Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain
News of events, regular bulletins, study materials, publications, and related links. Largely the work of Virginia Woolf specialist Stuart N. Clarke.

Bloomsbury Group - web links BBC Audio Essay – A Eulogy to Words
A charming sound recording of a BBC radio talk broadcast in 1937 – accompanied by a slideshow of photographs of Virginia Woolf.

Bloomsbury Group - web links A Family Photograph Albumn
Leslie Stephens’ collection of family photographs which became known as the Mausoleum Book, collected at Smith College – Massachusetts.

Bloomsbury Group - web links Bloomsbury at Duke University
A collection of book jacket covers, Fry’s Twelve Woodcuts, Strachey’s ‘Elizabeth and Essex’.

© Roy Johnson 2000-2014


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Harold Nicolson biography

September 20, 2009 by Roy Johnson

diplomat, writer, socialite and politician

Harold Nicolson biographyHarold Nicolson (1886-1968) was born into an upper middle-class family in Tehran, where his father (Lord Carnock) was the British ambassador to Persia. as it then was. He was educated at Wellington College then Balliol College Oxford, where he graduated with a third-class degree. He entered the diplomatic service in 1908 and was posted to Constantinople where he became a specialist in Balkan affairs. In 1910 he met Vita Sackville-West and despite her reservations about his diplomatic career (and her parents’ about his social status) they married in 1912 and had two sons.

He published biographies of the French poet Verlaine and studies of other literary figures such as Tennyson, Byron, Swinburne, and Saint-Beuve. His first major success (and still probably his best book) was Some People (1927), a witty collection of short stories and character sketches based on people he had met in the diplomatic service.

He and his wife were fringe members of the Bloomsbury Group, as well as visitors to Ottoline Morrell’s weekend parties at Garsington in Oxfordshire. Whilst Vita had affairs with Virginia Woolf and Violet Trefusis, he had liaisons with a series of men, including the literary critic Raymond Mortimer. They had a rather unusual marriage in which they lived separately a lot of the time, wrote to each other on almost a daily basis protesting their undying love to each other, and continued to have affairs with members of their own sex. All of this was recorded by their son in his Portrait of a Marriage.

After the end of the first world war he took part in the Paris Peace Conference, and he was very critical of the punitive reparations extracted by the allies (which also caused his fellow Bloomsburyite John Maynard Keynes to resign from the commission). At the end of 1929 he left the diplomatic service and went to work for Lord Beaverbrook on the Evening Standard. Despite (or maybe because of) his literary skills, he hated journalism: “It is a mere expense of spirit in a waste of shame. A constant hurried triviality which is bad for the mind.”.

In the 1930s, he and his wife bought Sissinghurst Castle, in the rural depths of Kent, the county known as the garden of England. There they created the renowned gardens that are now run by the National Trust. However, during the week he lived at the Albany, the famous bachelor chambers just off Piccadilly in London. He flirted briefly with Sir Oswald Mosley’s fascists, but then entered the House of Commons as National Labour Party member for Leicester West in 1935. (His wife refused to visit the constituency, regarding it as ‘bedint’ – a family slang term for ‘unacceptably low class’.)

He was very active as a parliamentarian, and became a keen supporter of Winston Churchill, especially during the second world war, when he was appointed private secretary to the Minister of Information in the government of national unity. He lost his seat in the 1945 election, and then despite joining the Labour Party, he failed to get back into parliament.

He turned to broadcasting and returned to journalism as an occupation. He was personally acquainted with a wide variety of figures such as Ramsay MacDonald, David Lloyd George, Duff Cooper, Charles de Gaulle, Anthony Eden and Winston Churchill, along with a host of literary and artistic figures. His Diaries provide a rich source of information on the world of diplomacy and politics in the years 1910-1960, and record meetings with Picasso, Diaghilev, Matisse, Marcel Proust, and James Joyce.

He never achieved high office, and when eventually awarded a knighthood, he was so snobbish he felt it as an insult, because he thought he ought to be made a member of the Lords – so that he could escape what he felt as his ‘plebeian’ surname. He spent the latter part of his life writing and developing the gardens at Sissinghurst.


Harold Nicolson biography


Bloomsbury Group – web links

Bloomsbury Group - web links Hogarth Press first editions
Annotated gallery of original first edition book jacket covers from the Hogarth Press, featuring designs by Vanessa Bell, Roger Fry, and others.

Bloomsbury Group - web links The Omega Workshops
A brief history of Roger Fry’s experimental Omega Workshops, which had a lasting influence on interior design in post First World War Britain.

Bloomsbury Group - web links The Bloomsbury Group and War
An essay on the largely pacifist and internationalist stance taken by Bloomsbury Group members towards the First World War.

Bloomsbury Group web links Tate Gallery Archive Journeys: Bloomsbury
Mini web site featuring photos, paintings, a timeline, sub-sections on the Omega Workshops, Roger Fry, and Duncan Grant, and biographical notes.

Bloomsbury Group - web links Bloomsbury: Books, Art and Design
Exhibition of paintings, designs, and ceramics at Toronto University featuring Hogarth Press, Vanessa Bell, Dora Carrington, Quentin Bell, and Stephen Tomlin.

Bloomsbury Group - web links Blogging Woolf
A rich enthusiast site featuring news of events, exhibitions, new book reviews, relevant links, study resources, and anything related to Bloomsbury and Virginia Woolf

Bloomsbury Group - web links Hyper-Concordance to Virginia Woolf
Search the texts of all Woolf’s major works, and track down phrases, quotes, and even individual words in their original context.

Bloomsbury Group - web links A Mrs Dalloway Walk in London
An annotated description of Clarissa Dalloway’s walk from Westminster to Regent’s Park, with historical updates and a bibliography.

Bloomsbury Group - web links Women’s History Walk in Bloomsbury
Annotated tour of literary and political homes in Bloomsbury, including Gordon Square, University College, Bedford Square, Doughty Street, and Tavistock Square.

Bloomsbury Group - web links Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain
News of events, regular bulletins, study materials, publications, and related links. Largely the work of Virginia Woolf specialist Stuart N. Clarke.

Bloomsbury Group - web links BBC Audio Essay – A Eulogy to Words
A charming sound recording of a BBC radio talk broadcast in 1937 – accompanied by a slideshow of photographs of Virginia Woolf.

Bloomsbury Group - web links A Family Photograph Albumn
Leslie Stephens’ collection of family photographs which became known as the Mausoleum Book, collected at Smith College – Massachusetts.

Bloomsbury Group - web links Bloomsbury at Duke University
A collection of book jacket covers, Fry’s Twelve Woodcuts, Strachey’s ‘Elizabeth and Essex’.

© Roy Johnson 2000-2014


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Filed Under: Biography, Bloomsbury Group, Harold Nicolson Tagged With: Biography, Bloomsbury Group, Cultural history, Harold Nicolson

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