Carrington Book

If you read English literature of the early 20th century you eventually kind of get sucked in to the Bloomsbury group, first by Virginia Woolf, then by Lytton Strachey, they act like a very polite whirlpool which serves you tea and cakes at 4 o'clock. And eventually you come upon the remarkable character of Dora Carrington and then you're at the heart of all the entanglements. Back in the 1920s and 30s, in upper class England, these Bloomsbury oddballs really tried hard to disrupt the tyrannical pigeonholing of people into gay and straight, married and single, writer and artist, etc. Carrington is a person who reaches out of the pages of her own life and catches you with a single glance and that's it, you're lost.

She fell in love with Lytton Strachey who was gay, and she loved him so much she would marry or cohabit with the guys that he liked. Not that many, it wasn't like Manhattan 1979 or anything. But still. When Lytton died of cancer she lasted a couple of days and then she committed suicide. Didn't want to be around if he wasn't there.

She painted and drew beautifully and wrote a fantastically articulate emotionally drenched journal, which has been published. She was like a highly precocious 14 year old all her life.

I don't think people live lives like this any more. Probably a good thing.