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Leonard & Virginia Woolf – Two Stories

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Hogarth Press bibliographic designs

Two Stories

 
Leonard and Viginia Woolf, Two Stories (1917)

This was the first publication of the Hogarth Press. It contains the story Three Jews by Leonard Woolf and the essay The Mark on the Wall by Virginia Woolf, with four small woodcuts by Dora Carrington. 150 copies were printed. It had 34 pages and sold for 1s. 6d.

We decided to print a paper-covered pamphlet containing a story by each of us and try to sell it by subscription to a limited number of people … We set to work and printed a thirty-two page pamphlet, demy octavo … We bound it ourselves by stitching it into paper covers.

The total number finally sold was 134, and all but five or six of them were friends or acquaintances … The total cost of production was £3 7s. 0d., which included the noble sum of 15s to Carrington for the woodcuts, 12s. 6d. for paper, and 10s. for the cover paper. The two authors were not paid any royalty. The total receipts turned out to be £10 8s. 0d., so that the net profit was £7 1s. 0d.

Leonard Woolf, An Autobiography

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Hogarth Press studies

Woolf's-head Publishing Woolf’s-head Publishing is a wonderful collection of cover designs, book jackets, and illustrations – but also a beautiful example of book production in its own right. It was produced as an exhibition catalogue and has quite rightly gone on to enjoy an independent life of its own. This book is a genuine collector’s item, and only months after its first publication it started to win awards for its design and production values. Anyone with the slightest interest in book production, graphic design, typography, or Bloomsbury will want to own a copy the minute they clap eyes on it.

Woolf's-head Publishing Buy the book at Amazon UK
Woolf's-head Publishing Buy the book at Amazon US

The Hogarth Press Leonard and Virginia Woolf as Publishers: Hogarth Press, 1917-41 John Willis brings the remarkable story of Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s success as publishers to life. He generates interesting thumbnail sketches of all the Hogarth Press authors, which brings both them and the books they wrote into sharp focus. He also follows the development of many of its best-selling titles, and there’s a full account of the social and cultural development of the press. This is a scholarly work with extensive footnotes, bibliographies, and suggestions for further reading – but most of all it is a very readable study in cultural history.

The Hogarth Press Buy the book at Amazon UK
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© Roy Johnson 2005

Leonard Woolf – Fear and Politics

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Hogarth Press first edition book jacket designs

 

Fear and Politics - first edition

 
Leonard Woolf, Fear and Politics (1925) Cover design by Vanessa Bell

This is number 7 in the first series of Hogarth Essays, which began in 1924. It was the first of Leonard Woolf’s political contributions to the press. Cover design by Vanessa Bell. In his essay, Leonard writes from the point of view of the animals in a zoo:

“Human beings delude themselves that a League of Nations or Protection or armies and navies are going to give them security and civilization in their jungle.” According to the narrator, who is an elephant, humans “are the savagest race of carnivora known in the jungle, and they will never be happy and civilized, and the world will never be safe for democracy or for any other animal, until each human animal is confined in a separate cage.”

J.H. Willis Jr, Leonard and Virginia Woolf as Publishers: The Hogarth Press 1917-1941

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Hogarth Press studies

Woolf's-head Publishing Woolf’s-head Publishing is a wonderful collection of cover designs, book jackets, and illustrations – but also a beautiful example of book production in its own right. It was produced as an exhibition catalogue and has quite rightly gone on to enjoy an independent life of its own. This book is a genuine collector’s item, and only months after its first publication it started to win awards for its design and production values. Anyone with the slightest interest in book production, graphic design, typography, or Bloomsbury will want to own a copy the minute they clap eyes on it.

Woolf's-head Publishing Buy the book at Amazon UK
Woolf's-head Publishing Buy the book at Amazon US

The Hogarth Press Leonard and Virginia Woolf as Publishers: Hogarth Press, 1917-41 John Willis brings the remarkable story of Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s success as publishers to life. He generates interesting thumbnail sketches of all the Hogarth Press authors, which brings both them and the books they wrote into sharp focus. He also follows the development of many of its best-selling titles, and there’s a full account of the social and cultural development of the press. This is a scholarly work with extensive footnotes, bibliographies, and suggestions for further reading – but most of all it is a very readable study in cultural history.

The Hogarth Press Buy the book at Amazon UK
The Hogarth Press Buy the book at Amazon US

© Roy Johnson 2005

Leonard Woolf – Quack! Quack!

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Hogarth Press first edition book jacket designs

 

Quack! Quack! - first edition
Leonard Woolf, Quack, Quack! (May, 1935) 2,000 copies, Printed by R & R Clark, 7s.6d.

“In his next two Hogarth Press books after the disappointment of After the Deluge (1931), Leonard Woolf published what he thought about Mussolini and his Fascist ambitions in Quack, Quack! (1935) and The League and Abyssinia (1936). The title of Quack, Quack! suggests the barnyard sounds of the orating Hitler and MUssolini. With devastating effect, Woolf matched photographs of the eye-bulging Hawaiian war god Kukailimoku to those of the gesticulating bellicose dictators. Woolf’s two-hundred page attack on fascism concentrated on the savage quackery of modern totalitarianism but also discussed the intellectual sources he found in Carlyle, Nietzsche, and Spengler. Woolf’s list of heroes who battled against the totalitarians for the light of civilization began with Erasmus and Montaigne and included Thomas More, Giordano Bruno, Spinoza, Descartes, Voltaire, Rousseau, Kant, and Goethe.”

J.H. Willis Jr, Leonard and Virginia Woolf as Publishers: The Hogarth Press 1917-1941

The striking, boldly-coloured dust jacket for this book was designed by E.McKnight Kauffer. A cheap edition of the book was published in 1936, priced at 2s.6d; it was reprinted again in 1937.

Elizabeth Willson Gordon, Woolf’s-head Publishing: The Highlights and New Lights of the Hogarth Press

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Hogarth Press studies

Woolf's-head Publishing Woolf’s-head Publishing is a wonderful collection of cover designs, book jackets, and illustrations – but also a beautiful example of book production in its own right. It was produced as an exhibition catalogue and has quite rightly gone on to enjoy an independent life of its own. This book is a genuine collector’s item, and only months after its first publication it started to win awards for its design and production values. Anyone with the slightest interest in book production, graphic design, typography, or Bloomsbury will want to own a copy the minute they clap eyes on it.

Woolf's-head Publishing Buy the book at Amazon UK
Woolf's-head Publishing Buy the book at Amazon US

The Hogarth Press Leonard and Virginia Woolf as Publishers: Hogarth Press, 1917-41 John Willis brings the remarkable story of Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s success as publishers to life. He generates interesting thumbnail sketches of all the Hogarth Press authors, which brings both them and the books they wrote into sharp focus. He also follows the development of many of its best-selling titles, and there’s a full account of the social and cultural development of the press. This is a scholarly work with extensive footnotes, bibliographies, and suggestions for further reading – but most of all it is a very readable study in cultural history.

The Hogarth Press Buy the book at Amazon UK
The Hogarth Press Buy the book at Amazon US

© Roy Johnson 2005

Leonard Woolf Autobiography – Vol I

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politics, life,  and literature – 1880 to 1969

Leonard Woolf is probably best known as the husband of Virginia Woolf, but in fact he had a remarkable life and set of achievements quite apart from his wife. He was a political activist and one of the founders of the League of Nations (which became the United Nations); he was a novelist and a journalist; and throughout the whole of his adult life he was a professional publisher, in charge of the very successful Hogarth Press, which he founded and ran successfully for fifty years.

Leonard Woolf Autobiography - Vol IThe first volume of his autobiography deals with his childhood in a prosperous upper middle-class Jewish family and his early memories of growing up in late Victorian London, then his intellectual flowering when he went to Cambridge. The are some wonderful character sketches of his contemporaries, who became luminaries of the Bloomsbury Group, including Saxon Sydney Turner, Lytton Strachey, and Clive Bell.

You also get full details of all the property leases and house buyings of this group as it established its regular system of one place in town and another in the countryside. Some of his more inspired passages are his tirades against mysticism, religious belief, and any surrender to irrationalism. He has a seductively convincing underpinning to his philosophic position that Nothing matters, which he interprets in a non-passive manner – no doubt his own brand of G.E.Moore’s ethics, which he absorbed at Cambridge along with the rest of the Apostles.

Occasionally he’s quite humorous, and he is certainly a humane, rational, and honest man; yet he seems slightly naive in claiming that money is not really important – a claim contradicted by his obsessive habit of listing every penny he spent and earned throughout his fife. But these are minor human inconsistencies.

The next part (a whole volume in its original publication) deals with a part of his life of which most literary enthusiasts know nothing – his work as a colonial administrator in Ceylon. These pages include scenes you would not normally associate with this pillar of Bloomsbury: supervising floggings and executions; eliminating outbreaks of rinderpest; trekking through jungles; and issuing certificates for celebrity big game hunters.

He comes across as a thoroughly decent, intelligent, hard-working man, with a particularly sharp eye for the underdog and a love of animals which makes him an animal liberationist before his time. His experiences in Ceylon made him increasingly anti-imperialist, so he quit the service in 1911 and married Virginia Woolf instead.

He lived an astonishingly rich and varied life post 1912 (covered in Volume II) engagement with the co-operative movement, a gradual shift to the Left in political terms, and friendships with all the leading literary and political figures of the day – H.G.Wells, G.B.Shaw, Bertrand Russell, Ramsay MacDonald, and T.S.Eliot. There are also sustained portraits of Ottoline Morrell, Isobel Colefax, Sigmund Freud (whose complete works he published) and Ramsay MacDonald. He also provides an impassioned account of the political dark years of the 1930s.

Politically, he was a left-wing realist. He served on endless committees, fighting for causes in which he believed. Yet he realised that the people amongst whom he worked, and the mechanisms they pursued, were deadly boring. Unlike many fellow travellers of the inter-war years, he was also well aware that the communists (in Soviet terms) killed more people than they helped or saved.

He’s very revealing on the mechanics of running a small independent publishing company, and he presents the profits and balance sheets of the Hogarth Press with the very conscious aim of revealing what most other writers talk about but never confess – how much they make from their writing.

As an autobiography, it’s long overdue for a reissue, but in the meantime, the two volume Oxford Paperbacks edition offers the full text with good indexes. Leonard Woolf went up in my estimation as a result of reading this memoir, and I am looking forward now to both his collected leters, and in particular to the letters he exchanged on almost a daily basis with his ‘lover’ Trekkie Parsons.

© Roy Johnson 2000

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Leonard Woolf, An Autobiography: 1880-1911 v. 1, Oxford: Oxford Paperbacks, 1980, pp.320, ISBN: 0192812890

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Leonard Woolf Autobiography – Vol II

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politics, life, and literature 1911-1969

Leonard Woolf is probably best known as the husband of Virginia Woolf, but in fact he had a remarkable life and set of achievements quite apart from his wife. He was a political activist and one of the founders of the League of Nations (which became the United Nations); he was a novelist and a journalist; and throughout the whole of his adult life he was a professional publisher, in charge of the very successful Hogarth Press, which he founded and ran successfully for fifty years.

Leonard Woolf: AutobiographyThe first volume of his autobiography dealt with his childhood in a prosperous upper middle-class Jewish family and his early memories of growing up in late Victorian London, then his intellectual flowering when he went to Cambridge. The are some wonderful character sketches of his contemporaries, who became luminaries of the Bloomsbury Group, including Saxon Sydney Turner, Lytton Strachey, and Clive Bell.

He comes across as a thoroughly decent, intelligent, hard-working man, with a particularly sharp eye for the underdog and a love of animals which makes him an animal liberationist before his time. His experiences in Ceylon made him increasingly anti-imperialist, so he quit the service in 1911 and married Virginia Woolf instead.

This second volume covers his astonishingly rich and varied life post 1912 – engagement with the co-operative movement, a gradual shift to the Left in political terms, and friendships with all the leading literary and political figures of the day – H.G.Wells, G.B.Shaw, Bertrand Russell, Ramsay MacDonald, and T.S.Eliot. There are also sustained portraits of Ottoline Morrell, Isobel Colefax, Sigmund Freud (whose complete works he published) and Ramsay MacDonald. He also provides an impassioned account of the political dark years of the 1930s.

Politically, he was a left-wing realist. He served on endless committees, fighting for causes in which he believed. Yet he realised that the people amongst whom he worked, and the mechanisms they pursued, were deadly boring. Unlike many fellow travellers of the inter-war years, he was also well aware that the communists (in Soviet terms) killed more people than they helped or saved.

He’s very revealing on the mechanics of running a small independent publishing company, and he presents the profits and balance sheets of the Hogarth Press with the very conscious aim of revealing what most other writers talk about but never confess – how much they make from their writing.

In the last part of his memoir, written when he was eighty-five, it has to be said that he rambles quite a lot, and goes over ground he has already covered earlier. But this does help to reinforce the tremendous variety in his life. He felt that all his political efforts amounted to nothing, and that the Hogarth Press had been successful because it had been kept small scale and independent. He’s probably a bit too hard on himself politically, and anybody with a CV half as long could hold their head up high.

However, this is not a memoir full of gossip or personal revelation. You would never know from this that his wife fell in love with another woman, or that he had a largely sexless relationship with her. Nor would you ever guess that for the last thirty years of his life he shared the wife of his business associate on a weekend-weekday basis.

As an autobiography, it’s long overdue for a reissue, but in the meantime, the two volume Oxford Paperbacks edition offers the full text with good indexes. Leonard Woolf went up in my estimation as a result of reading this memoir, and I am looking forward now to both his collected leters, and in particular to the letters he exchanged on almost a daily basis with his ‘lover’ Trekkie Parsons.

© Roy Johnson 2000

redbtnSee volume one of this autobiography

Buy the book at Amazon UK

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Leonard Woolf, An Autobiography: 1911-1969 v. 2, Oxford: Oxford Paperbacks, 1980, pp.536, ISBN: 0192812904

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Love Letters: Leonard Woolf and Trekkie Parsons

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Bloomsbury’s secret love affair

Everybody knows that Leonard Woolf nursed his wife Virginia Woolf through periods of mental and physical illness, right up to the point of her suicide in 1941. What is not so well known is that he did this at the same time as being a full time journalist and author, a Labour Party activist responsible for the development of the League of Nations, and a successful commercial publisher in charge of the Hogarth Press. Even less well known is the fact that within twelve months of his wife’s death he began a relationship with a woman which was to last for the rest of his life.

Love Letters: Leonard Woolf & Trekkie ParsonsNot that there was anything wrong with his forming a new relationship – but the woman happened to be married to someone else. She was Trekkie Parsons, an artist and book illustrator, and her second husband Ian Parsons eventually became Leonard Woolf’s business partner. The actual content of the letters is fairly inconsequential: arrangements for meeting; reflections on botanical matters; lots of endearments; the desire (on his part) for more contact; and occasional comments on their contemporaries. They had lots of shared interests – pet animals, horticulture, and even printing. He was after all an independent publisher, and she studied and practised all sorts of printing techniques.

Leonard is clearly the more enamoured: as a widower, living alone, he yearns for more time with her. But she warns against their relationship becoming passionate – using a form of words which would give anyone pause for thought: ‘I want you to love me you see – but not as an epidemic disease all covered in spots & then quite cured’.

When her husband was posted to France she went to live with Woolf at Monks House in Lewes (sleeping in Virginia Woolf’s old bed) – though it also has to be said that when Ian Parsons was demobbed in 1945 all three of them moved into the same house in London.

In fact for the near thirty years that their relationship existed, she split herself between the two men. She supported her husband in his business ventures and enjoyed their busy social life together. They were said to be a ‘well-oiled unit’. But she spent a large part of the working week with Leonard, and even went on holidays with him.

There is no evidence in the letters that her husband was at all worried about what was going on, but when Parsons started an affair of his own with his business partner Nora Smallwood, Trekkie was not impervious to jealousy.

The most amazing thing is that there is hardly a word in what they write to each other over a span of almost three decades about the oddity, ambiguity, or any tensions in their relationship. Even the footnotes remain silent on that score.

The question which anyone with an ounce of curiosity or a spoonful of blood in their veins will want to know is – was the relationship physically intimate? And the amazing thing is that there is not a jot of evidence either way so far as I could see – which makes it all the more curious.

The editing of the letters is quite scholarly. Whenever someone new is mentioned, an explanation of who they are is offered in a footnote. But there is little analysis or interpretation of events.

Leonard claimed that Trekkie was the best thing that had ever happened to him. He made her his executrix and principal legatee. And when his will was contested by members of his own family, these letters were adduced in court as evidence of merely a ‘literary and social friendship’. Moreover, Trekkie herself claimed (at the age of ninety) that the relationship had not been sexual.

If that is true, Leonard Woolf spent almost six decades devoted to two women, Virginia and Trekkie, with whom he had sexless relationships. It is no good going to his excellent Autobiography to discover more, because he is just as reserved about his private life there. One can only read and stand back, amazed at yet another facet of Bloomsbury life.

© Roy Johnson 2004

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Judith Adamson (editor), Love Letters: Leonard Woolf & Trekkie Parsons 1941-1968, London: Pimlico, 2002, pp.312, ISBN: 0712664734

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Maurice Dobb – Russia To-day and To-morrow

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Hogarth Press first edition book jacket designs

 

Russia Today and Tomorrow - first edition

 
Maurice Dobb, Russia Today and Tomorrow (1930) Hogarth Day to Day pamphlets, Number 1.

The colophon design was by the American artist E.McKnight Kauffer. It was used on many other Hogarth publications as an alternative to the original dog’s head design by Vanessa Bell. Price 1s. 6d.

“Reporting on his second trip to Russia in 1929, Dobb provided in six chapters a perceptive, generally approving, but not uncritical survey of Soviet history, politics, economics, industrial development, and cultural revolution. His visit came just after the relaxed and stimulating New Economic Policy period (1921—28) had been controverted by the Five Year Plan and the Russian Association of Proletarian writers. While Dobb recognised the increasing pressure for conformity to Marxist ideology, he still reported finding tolerance for experimentation in the arts.”

J.H. Willis Jr, Leonard and Virginia Woolf as Publishers: The Hogarth Press 1917-1941

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Hogarth Press studies

Woolf's-head Publishing Woolf’s-head Publishing is a wonderful collection of cover designs, book jackets, and illustrations – but also a beautiful example of book production in its own right. It was produced as an exhibition catalogue and has quite rightly gone on to enjoy an independent life of its own. This book is a genuine collector’s item, and only months after its first publication it started to win awards for its design and production values. Anyone with the slightest interest in book production, graphic design, typography, or Bloomsbury will want to own a copy the minute they clap eyes on it.

Woolf's-head Publishing Buy the book at Amazon UK
Woolf's-head Publishing Buy the book at Amazon US

The Hogarth Press Leonard and Virginia Woolf as Publishers: Hogarth Press, 1917-41 John Willis brings the remarkable story of Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s success as publishers to life. He generates interesting thumbnail sketches of all the Hogarth Press authors, which brings both them and the books they wrote into sharp focus. He also follows the development of many of its best-selling titles, and there’s a full account of the social and cultural development of the press. This is a scholarly work with extensive footnotes, bibliographies, and suggestions for further reading – but most of all it is a very readable study in cultural history.

The Hogarth Press Buy the book at Amazon UK
The Hogarth Press Buy the book at Amazon US

© Roy Johnson 2005

On Being Ill

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Hogarth Press first edition book jacket designs

 

On Being Ill cover - first edition

 
Virginia Woolf, On Being Ill (1930) Cover design by Vanessa Bell.

“Not until 1930 did [Virginia and Leonard Woolf] hand print another of Virginia’s works, a small essay On Being Ill. To possible critics of the slightly botched printing of On Being Ill Virginia composed a tongue-in-cheek form letter which she never sent. Such a charming disclaimer could well serve as a summing up of the Woolf’s hand printing over the years. Beginning “Dear Madam,” Virginia agreed that “the colour is uneven, the letters not always clear, the spacing inaccurate, and the word ‘campion’ should read ‘companion””. Her defense was that she and Leonard were amateur printers without formal training, who fit in their hobby amid busy lives. But, she added, the volume was already worth more than it cost because of over-subscription, so that although “we have not satisfied your taste, we hope that we have not robbed your purse”.

J.H. Willis Jr, Leonard and Virginia Woolf as Publishers: The Hogarth Press 1917-1941

One of the last books hand printed by the Woolfs, On Being Ill is a fairly short essay by Woolf that explores not only illness, but also solitude, sympathy, and reading. Woolf writes, for example, that in illness “It is to the poets that we turn. Illness makes us disinclined for the long campaigns that prose exacts” The words of On Being Ill are both written and printed by Woolf. The book shows a greater sophistication than some of the earlier books, though there are still some errors that remind one that humans rather than machines created the book.

Elizabeth Willson Gordon, Woolf’s-head Publishing: The Highlights and New Lights of the Hogarth Press

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Hogarth Press studies

Woolf's-head Publishing Woolf’s-head Publishing is a wonderful collection of cover designs, book jackets, and illustrations – but also a beautiful example of book production in its own right. It was produced as an exhibition catalogue and has quite rightly gone on to enjoy an independent life of its own. This book is a genuine collector’s item, and only months after its first publication it started to win awards for its design and production values. Anyone with the slightest interest in book production, graphic design, typography, or Bloomsbury will want to own a copy the minute they clap eyes on it.

Woolf's-head Publishing Buy the book at Amazon UK
Woolf's-head Publishing Buy the book at Amazon US

The Hogarth Press Leonard and Virginia Woolf as Publishers: Hogarth Press, 1917-41 John Willis brings the remarkable story of Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s success as publishers to life. He generates interesting thumbnail sketches of all the Hogarth Press authors, which brings both them and the books they wrote into sharp focus. He also follows the development of many of its best-selling titles, and there’s a full account of the social and cultural development of the press. This is a scholarly work with extensive footnotes, bibliographies, and suggestions for further reading – but most of all it is a very readable study in cultural history.

The Hogarth Press Buy the book at Amazon UK
The Hogarth Press Buy the book at Amazon US

© Roy Johnson 2005

R.C.Trevelyan – Beelzebub

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Hogarth Press first edition book jacket designs

 

Beelzebub - first edition

 
R.C. Trevelyan, Beelzebub and other poems, Hogarth Living Poets, second series, Number 3.

“R.C. Trevelyan, member of a distinguished Victorian family and brother of the Cambridge historian G.M. Trelyan, had been an Apostle at Trinity College, friend of the Woolfs for years, and by the 1920s was a classical scholar, a translator (Sophocles, Aeschylus, Lucretius, Theocritus), and a poet. He would eventually publish over twenty volumes of poetry.”

J.H. Willis Jr, Leonard and Virginia Woolf as Publishers: The Hogarth Press 1917-1941

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Hogarth Press studies

Woolf's-head Publishing Woolf’s-head Publishing is a wonderful collection of cover designs, book jackets, and illustrations – but also a beautiful example of book production in its own right. It was produced as an exhibition catalogue and has quite rightly gone on to enjoy an independent life of its own. This book is a genuine collector’s item, and only months after its first publication it started to win awards for its design and production values. Anyone with the slightest interest in book production, graphic design, typography, or Bloomsbury will want to own a copy the minute they clap eyes on it.

Woolf's-head Publishing Buy the book at Amazon UK
Woolf's-head Publishing Buy the book at Amazon US

The Hogarth Press Leonard and Virginia Woolf as Publishers: Hogarth Press, 1917-41 John Willis brings the remarkable story of Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s success as publishers to life. He generates interesting thumbnail sketches of all the Hogarth Press authors, which brings both them and the books they wrote into sharp focus. He also follows the development of many of its best-selling titles, and there’s a full account of the social and cultural development of the press. This is a scholarly work with extensive footnotes, bibliographies, and suggestions for further reading – but most of all it is a very readable study in cultural history.

The Hogarth Press Buy the book at Amazon UK
The Hogarth Press Buy the book at Amazon US

© Roy Johnson 2005

Ralph Partridge

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a ‘major’ in the heart of the Bloomsbury Group

Ralph Partridge (real name Reginald Sherring Partridge) was born in 1894. His father was in the Indian civil service. Ralph was educated at Christ Church college, Oxford University. On the outbreak of the first world war he joined the British Army, and served throughout until 1918, reaching the rank of major. During that time he met and befriended Gerald Brenan, who was also serving in the army as a captain.

Ralph Partridge

Ralph Partridge and Frances Marshall

At the end of the war he returned to Oxford to finish his education. There he met the book designer Noel Carrington, who in 1918 introduced him to his sister, the painter Dora Carrington. At that time Dora (who was known simply as ‘Carrington’) was living in Tidmarch, Berkshire with the writer Lytton Strachey, who had just had a big success with his study Eminent Victorians. Strachey was a homosexual, but Carrington had fallen in love with him and devoted herself to his wellbeing. It was Strachey who christened Partridge with the nickname ‘Ralph’. These connections gave Partridge the entree to the Bloomsbury Group and its members.

Partridge moved into the farmhouse at Mill House, and Carrington began an affair with him. She was attracted to a man who was tall, physically robust, and very handsome. He was known amongst the Bloomsbury Group people as ‘the major’. Rather conveniently, Lytton Strachey also fell in love with him, and they developed a curious three-sided relationship – although biographical evidence suggests that Partridge was entirely heterosexual.

In the summer of 1920 Partridge began work for Virginia Woolf and Leonard Woolf at the Hogarth Press. This gave him just enough money to marry Carrington in 1921. Strachey very generously paid for their wedding, and all three of them even went on honeymoon together to Venice. They were also friendly with Partridge’s old wartime colleague Gerald Brenan, and in 1922 travelled to visit him at his retreat in the mountains of Andalusia.

An affair between Carrinton and Brenan developed on this visit, and caused a temporary rift between the two wartime comrades. Partridge felt deeply wounded by this act of betrayal by his friend, but Lytton Strachey persuaded him not to sacrifice the friendship, and after two years Partridge eventually got over it. However, the marriage was never the same again.

In 1924 Partridge and Strachey jointly purchased Ham Spray House near Hungerford in the Wiltshire Downs. The menage a trois continued, but through his work for the Hogarth Press Partridge met Frances Marshall whilst she was working in David Garnett‘s bookshop in Taviton Street, Bloomsbury. A relationship developed between them, and in 1925 they went on holiday to Spain together. They planned to live together in London, but Lytton Strachey argued that this would cause a break up of the three-pillared unity at Ham Spray.

However, Carrington eventually agreed to ‘share’ her husband with Frances and in 1926 Partridge and Francis moved to live in the house of psycho-analysts James and Alix Strachey in Gordon Square, Bloomsbury. Ralph went back to see his wife and Lytton Strachey at weekends. But in early 1932 Lytton Strachey died very suddenly from stomach cancer, after which Carrington committed suicide. Since Partridge was still legal owner of Ham Spray House, he moved back there with Frances, and they were married the following year.

According to The Times: “For the next thirty years, the marriage was extraordinarily close. Ralph, very good-looking, was highly intelligent and loyal, but not always easy. He had a formidable presence and loved arguing. Frances was his equal in debate, and never lost her head; and she could soothe him. More important were their intense interest in people and their highly developed senses of humour. They talked about everything together, and for the last twenty-eight years were never apart for more than a day. Few marriages can have been so enjoyable, not just for the lucky (and skilful) couple, but for their friends.” Ralph Partridge died of a heart-attack in 1960.

The Bloomsbury GroupThe Bloomsbury Group is a short but charming book, published by the National Portrait Gallery. It explores the impact of Bloomsbury personalities on each other, plus how they shaped the development of British modernism in the early part of the twentieth century. But most of all it’s a delightful collection of portrait paintings and photographs, with biographical notes. It has an introductory essay which outlines the development of Bloomsbury, followed by a series of portraits and the biographical sketches of the major figures.

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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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