Carrington's Letters

Dora Carrington was born in 1893 in Hereford. At 17 she enrolled at the Slade School of Fine Art, part of an extraordinary generation of painters including Mark Gertler and Paul and John Nash. She painted her friends, her house, her animals, her furniture and designed jackets for books published by Virginia and Leonard Woolf’s Hogarth Press. She was the long-time companion of writer Lytton Strachey, though in 1921 she married Ralph Partridge, who joined her and Lytton in a largely harmonious ménage à trois. In 1932, after the death of Strachey from cancer, she committed suicide, aged thirty-eight. Anne Chisholm is a biographer and critic who won the Silver PEN Prize for non-fiction for Nancy Cunard: A Biography and was shortlisted for the Marsh Biography Award for Frances Partridge. She is a former chair and now vice president of the Royal Society of Literature.