Frances Partridge

Julia Strachey

A sardonic and beautifully written about a family in Forster territory, first published by the Hogarth Press in 1932.

Cheerful Weather for the Wedding

Julian Bell

Tate Gallery

Noel Gilroy Annan Baron Annan

Simon Watney

Deborah Gage

A Record of the Commemoration for Quentin Bell at the Tate Gallery, London on 25th March 1997

Francis Partridge's diaries are the record of a woman who not only participated in the lives of the legendary Bloomsbury group, but was the circle’s oldest surviving member until her death in 2004. Hanging On contains, among her reflections on her own life, her private thoughts on the complex relations between herself, Dora Carrington, Lytton Strachey, and her beloved husband Ralph. It is with the death of Ralph in 1960 that this book opens. But even in the depths of morbidity, Frances Partridge never loses her knowledge of the fecundity of life, her sense of fun, her eye for absurdity, or her capacity and hunger for beauty, that much-derided Bloomsbury characteristic.

Diaries December 1960- August 1963

Hanging on

The Bloomsbury Group was as well known for its love affairs as for the work that was produced by its members. Of all the romantic entanglements, the love quadrangle between Frances Partridge, her husband Ralph Partridge, his first wife, Dora and Lytton Strachey was one of the most tortured (Frances loved Ralph, who loved Dora, who loved Lytton, who loved Ralph) - and tragic, ending in the death of Strachey and the suicide of Dora. Love in Bloomsbury, Frances Partridge's celebrated account of these turbulent years, describes her Victorian upbringing and tells the story of the star-crossed quartet, two of whom were doomed, the other two survivors. Replete with vivid accounts of parties and infused with the heady, Bohemian atmosphere which flourished after the First World War and revealing character sketches of all the principal "Bloomsberries" - Leonard and Virginia Woolf, her sister Vanessa Bell, John Maynard Keynes and Roger Fry. This is 'Bloomsbury laid bare' - a window onto the lives, loves and excesses of some of the 20th centuries most intriguing, yet engimatic, players.

Love in Bloomsbury

The diaries of Frances Partridge, the oldest surviving member of the Bloomsbury Group, from 1967 to 1970. Confronted by times of great adversity, she refuses to indulge in self pity. A patient listener to other people's troubles, she can also be outspoken in her criticism of her friends and their beliefs, in the name of truth. She has a deep thirst for travel and love of her friends. In this volume she goes to Sicily with Rosamund Lehmann, to Spain to visit Gerald Brenan after the death of his wife, to Italy with Bunny Garnett and to Cyprus with Heywood and Anne Hill.

Frances Partridge

About

Books

Join the club