LETTERS: Dora Carrington – Frances Partridge Correspondence
Dora Carrington – Frances Partridge
Correspondence
Ca. 1924-1926
Carrington, Dora and France Partridge. Dora Carrington – Frances Partridge Correspondence. Ca. 1924-1926.
A series of revelatory letters between Dora Carrington and Frances Partridge. The relationship among Carrington, her idol Lytton Strachey (best-known for his ground-breaking studies Queen Victoria and Eminent Victorians), her husband Ralph Partridge (coincidentally, the first paid assistant at Virginia Woolf’s Hogarth Press and far from their most beloved), and Ralph’s lover Frances Marshall makes some of the more famous denizens of Bloomsbury seem comparatively conventional. Carrington, in love with the confirmed homosexual Lytton, moved in with him at Ham Spray House in 1917. She married Ralph, deeply in love with her, in 1921, and the two lived together with Lytton from 1922. Despite her love for Lytton and her commitment to her husband, Carrington had an affair with Ralph’s close friend Gerald Brennan. Ralph followed suit, initiating a liason with considerably more staying power with Frances. Lytton, meanwhile, was in love with Ralph, and threatened to leave Carrington if she lost her husband. Ralph began in 1923 spending weekdays with Frances in London and weekends at Ham Spray with Carrington and Lytton.
The letters present here, all composed between 1924 and 1926, show Carrington desperately trying to pry her husband from the grasp of Frances – to whom she felt close and whom she had even, in the past, propositioned. Frances’s response is also present. In an undated letter composed at Ham Spray, Carrington sends amusing sketches, thanks her for a gift, propositions her good-naturedly, and writes in the hope of a visit that weekend if it rains:
I still maintain if that vulture [i.e., Ralph?] wasn’t so devouring, I should very quickly gain your attentions Miss, to say nothing of your bed – If it is fine think kindly of me. If it is wet I shall see you here, & show you, I hope, my affection. You say you like me more than I like you --? How can we prove such a delicate point? Ralph returned looking rather hollow-eyed, & worn but very gay and happy – for which I am to thank --? …Remember always that there are few people fonder of you than your Carrington.
In another letter, also undated but clearly later, she writes from Ham Spray in desperation; Ralph seems to have decided to leave her for Frances, and Carrington, contemplating the loss then of both her husband and of her Lytton, offers terms of a “treaty”:
… We each know what we have all three been feeling these last months – now it is more or less over. The treaty has to be drawn up. I have to face that owing to a situation, which cannot be got over, I must give up living with R. I simply now write quite frankly, to beg you to try, while these adjustments are being made, to see the position from my point of view & to try & see, if is not [in?]compatible with your happiness, to still let me keep some of my friendship with R….
I do love R., only in a different way, just as you love him. It isn’t any easier for me to give him up than it would be for you.… The bare truth from my point of view is that if R. leaves me completely, or to all practical purposes completely, it really means an end of this life.… Even although the happiness of my relation with Lytton, ironically, is so bound up with R., that that will be wrecked.
I am obliged to accept this situation. You must see that. All I can do is to beg you to be, any rate at first, a little generous. You see I’ve no pride, I write a letter which I suppose I oughtn’t to write.
You see, Frances, you can afford to be lenient because R. is so completely yours in his affections. In spite of all your difficulties, & unhappiness, you are a gainer, we losers. And if you face it, the sitation really is that R can only give me what you can spare to give. My future does rest with you.
Because I regard it all beyond us, in an
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