Biography Archives - Page 3 of 13

Deceived with Kindness

May 18, 2009 by Roy Johnson

insider victim’s take of Bloomsbury goings-on

Angelica Garnett is the daughter of Vanessa Bell and her lover Duncan Grant. At the time of Angelica’s birth, Vanessa was still married to Clive Bell, so Angelica was passed off to the world as his daughter, though many people in the inner circle of the Bloomsbury Group knew the truth. This crucial fact of her provenance was concealed from her until she was nineteen years old – whereupon she ‘avenged’ herself on the family by marrying David Garnett, who had been her father’s lover even before she was born.

This was the central drama of her life, and this memoir is her side of the story. But it is also a vivid recollection of being raised in the heart of all that was Bloomsbury. She starts with a psychological portrait of her mother, childhood memories of living at the family home Charleston amongst Vanessa, Clive, Duncan, and their friends Roger Fry and relatives Virginia Woolf and Leonard Woolf. There are also idyllic holidays in France which seem to come from a bygone era.

At first, when she deals with the deception perpetrated by Vanessa, Clive, and Duncan she lets them all off quite lightly, providing them with convenient excuses and admitting (rather surprisingly, but par for this course) that her own true father’s feelings are unknown to her.

There are lots of very charming scenes: life in Gordon Square, being washed in the bath by Maynard Keynes; Christmas with her ‘grandparents’ the Bells, surrounded by cooks, housemaids, and servants. There are some very lyrical episodes evoking upper-class life which although taking place in the 1920s might as well have been the late Victorian or early Edwardian period.

Some of her most perceptive passages are those in which she describes the relationship between her mother’s artistic theories and her practice as an artist. The fact for instance that since Vanessa considered the subject matter of pictorial art unimportant, it was unnecessary for her to go any further than the bottom of the garden to find something worth painting.

There are extended portraits of Clive Bell and Duncan Grant, though it is odd that neither of them is referred to as ‘father’ – even though throughout the whole of her childhood Bell had been falsely ascribed to her as such.

On the subject of her aunt Virginia Woolf she wonders if she had ever made love to her husband Leonard. Yet she is writing as an adult, by which time she would have not only known the answer, but also that Virginia had also slept with Vita Sackville-West. The book is a charming evocation of a privileged youth, but for an in depth knowledge of its subjects, additional sources are definitely required.

She saves the most dramatic part of her story for last. Her very unequal relationship with David Garnett (she was twenty-six years younger) takes place against a backdrop of family disapproval, the onset of the second world war, and the suicide of her aunt Virginia.

Despite the apparent sophistication of the Bloomsbury set, most of the adults behave badly in concealing the important details of their former liaisons from her, and I couldn’t help but feel sorry for her. She is at her most insightful in analysing the shortcomings of her mother, her father, and her husband – all conspirators against her psychological wellbeing.

After one hundred and fifty pages of indulgence and lyric evocation of a privileged upbringing, I finally began to admire her and it made this Bloomsbury memoir worth reading after all.

Buy the book at Amazon UK

Buy the book at Amazon US

Angelica Garnett, Deceived with Kindness: A Bloomsbury Childhood, London: Pimlico, new edition 1995, p.192, ISBN: 0712662669

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DH Lawrence biographies and bibliographies

September 18, 2009 by Roy Johnson

arranged in chronological order of publication

1. D.H.Lawrence – Bibliographies, Handbooks, Journals

Warren Roberts, A Bibliography of D.H. Lawrence, 1963; revised. [The revised edition of this important Lawrence bibliography includes a section on the criticism].

Graham Holderness, Who’s Who in D.H. Lawrence, 1976.

Keith Sagar, D.H.Lawrence: A Calendar of His Works, 1979.

Keith Sagar, A D.H.Lawrence Handbook, 1982.

James C Cowan, D.H.Lawrence: An Annotated Bibliography of Writings About Him, Vol I (1909-60) 1982; Vol II (1961-75) 1985.

Thomas Jackson Rice, D.H.Lawrence: A Guide to Research, 1983.

The D H Lawrence Review, founded in 1968 by James C Cowan at the University of Delaware, is published three times a year. DHLR includes regular bibliographical updates as well as essays on a wide range of subjects to do with Lawrence, and reviews of recent work. Etudes Laurentiennes, founded in 1985, is published by the University of Paris X [Nanterre].

The Complete Critical Guide to D. H. Lawrence is a good introduction to Lawrence criticism. Includes a potted biography of Lawrence, an outline of the stories, novels, plays, and poetry, and pointers towards the main critical writings – from contemporaries T.S. Eliot and E.M. Forster to critics of the present day. Also includes a thorough bibliography which covers biography, criticism in books and articles, plus pointers towards specialist Lawrence journals.

2. Select Biography

R. West, D.H. Lawrence, London: Martin Secker, 1930.

A. Lawrence, Young Lorenzo: Early Life of D.H.Lawrence, Containing Hitherto Unpublished Letters and Articles and reproductions of Pictures, Florence: G. Orioli, 1931.

A. Lawrence and S.G. Gelder, Young Lorenzo: Early Life of D.H.Lawrence, Containing Hitherto Unpublished Letters and Articles and reproductions of Pictures, London: Martin Secker, 1932.

John Middleton Murry, Son of Woman: The Story of D.H.Lawrence, London: Jonathan Cape, 1931.

M. Dodge Luhan, Loenzo in Taos, New York: Knopf, 1932.

Aldous Huxley (ed), The Letters of D.H. Lawrence, London: Heinemann, 1932.

John Middleton Murry, Reminiscences of D.H. Lawrence, London: Jonathan Cape, 1933.

John Middleton Murry, Between Two Worlds: An Autobiography, London: Jonathan Cape, 1935.

D. Brett, Lawrence and Brett: A Friendship, Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott, 1933.

Catherine Carswell, The Savage Pilgrimage: A Narrative of D.H.Lawrence, New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1932.

Frieda Lawrence, Not I, But the Wind…, New York: Viking Press, 1934.

E.T. [Jessie Chambers], D.H. Lawrence: A Personal Record, London: Cape, 1935.

K. Merrild, A Poet and Two Painters, London: Routledge, 1938.

Frieda Lawrence, The Memoirs and Correspondence [ed Tedlock] 1964.

E. Brewster and A. Brewster, D.H. Lawrence: reminiscences and correspondence, London: Secker, 1934.

Piero Nardi, La Vita di D.H.Lawrence, 1947. [The first full biography of DHL]

Richard Aldington, D.H.Lawrence: Portrait of a Genius, But…, London: Heinemann, 1950.

Harry T. Moore, The Life and Works of D.H. Lawrence, London: Unwin Books, 1951.

E. Nehls (ed), D.H. Lawrence: A Composite Biography, 3 vols, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1957.

Harry T. Moore, A D.H. Lawrence Miscellany, London: Heinemann, 1961.

Harry T. Moore (ed), The Collected Letters of D.H. Lawrence, London: Heinemann, 1962.

Harry T. Moore, The Priest of Love, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1954, revised 1974.

H.D. [Hilda Doolittle], Bid Me To Live, New York: Grove Press, 1960.

E.W. Tedlock Jr (ed), Frieda Lawrence: the Memoirs and Correspondence, London: Heinemann, 1961.

H. Corke, D.H. Lawrence: The Croydon Years, Austin: University of Texas Press, 1965.

Harry T. Moore and Warren Roberts, D.H.Lawrence and his World [illustrated] 1966.

Edward Nehls (ed), D.H.Lawrence: A Composite Biography (3 vols, 1957-9).

Emile Delavenay, [trans. K.M. Delavenay] D.H.Lawrence: The Man and His Work. The Formative Years: [1885-1919], London: Heinemann, 1972.

Robert Lucas, Frieda Lawrence: The Story of Frieda von Richtofen and D.H.Lawrence, 1973.

H. Corke, In Our Infancy: An Autobiography Part I: 1882-1912, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975.

Paul Delany, D.H.Lawrence’s Nightmare: The Writer and his Circle in the Years of the Great War, Hassocks: Harvester, 1979.

Keith Sagar, The Life of D.H.Lawrence: An Illustrated Biography, 1980.

G. Neville (ed. C. Baron), A Memoir of D.H. Lawrence: (The Betrayal), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981.

Anthony Burgess, Flame Into Being: The Life and Works of D.H.Lawrence, 1985.

Keith Sagar, D.H.Lawrence: Life Into Art, 1985.

John Worthen, D.H.Lawrence: A Literary Life, 1989.

Jeffrey Meyers, D.H.Lawrence: A Biography, 1990.

John Worthen, D.H.Lawrence: The Early Years: 1885-1912: The Cambridge Biography of D.H. Lawrence, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.

Elaine Feinstein, Lawrence’s Women: The Intimate Life of D.H. Lawrence, London: Harper Collins, 1993.

Peter Preston, A D.H.Lawrence Chronology, 1994.

R. Jackson, Frieda Lawrence, Including ‘Not I, But the Wind’ and other Autobiographical Writings, London: Pandora, 1994.

Brenda Maddox, The Married Man: A Biography of D.H.Lawrence, London: Sinclair Stevenson, 1994.

Janet Byrne, A Genius for Living: A Biography of Frieda Lawrence, London: Bloomsbury, 1995.

M. Kinkead-Weekes, D.H.Lawrence: Triumph to Exile: 1912-1922, The Cambridge Biography of D.H.Lawrence 1885-1930, vol. 2, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.

J.T. Boulton (ed), The Selected Letters of D.H. Lawrence, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.

D. Ellis, D.H. Lawrence: Dying Game 1922-1930, The Cambridge Biography of D.H.Lawrence 1885-1930, vol. 3, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.

D.H.Lawrence – web links

D.H.Lawrence at Mantex
Biographical notes, book reviews, study guides, videos, bibliographies, critical studies, and web links.

D.H.Lawrence at Project Gutenberg
A major collection of free eTexts of the novels, stories, travel writing, and poetry – available in a variety of formats.

D.H.Lawrence at Wikipedia
Biographical notes, social background, publishing history, the Lady Chatterley trial, critical reputation, bibliography, archives, and web links.

D.H.Lawrence at the Internet Movie Database
Adaptations of Lawrence’s work for the cinema and television – in various languages. Full details of directors, actors, production, box office, trivia, and even quizzes.

D.H.Lawrence archive at the University of Nottingham
Biography, further reading, textual genetics, frequently asked questions, his local reputation, research centre, bibliographies, and lists of holdings.

D.H.Lawrence and Eastwood
Nottinhamshire local enthusiast web site featuring biography, historical and recent photographs of the Eastwood area and places associated with Lawrence.

The World of D.H.Lawrence
Yet another University of Nottingham web site featuring biography, interactive timeline, maps, virtual tour, photographs, and web links.

D.H.Lawrence Heritage
Local authority style web site, with maps, educational centre, and details of lectures, visits, and forthcoming events.

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Dora Carrington biography

September 17, 2009 by Roy Johnson

painter, designer, bohemian, bisexual

Dora 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.

Gertler 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.

Although 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.

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

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.

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.

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

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: 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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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Dorothy Brett biography

December 12, 2010 by Roy Johnson

painter, socialite, Bloomsbury group member

Dorothy 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 – “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.