27 March 2007

Love in Bloomsbury

Beautiful, well read, and educated at Cambridge, Frances Partridge was a member of the Bloomsbury Group and until quite recently the last survivor of its most famous love quadrangle. These are her memoirs, which sketch out her childhood and adolescence, then focus on that celebrated quartet, two of whom were doomed, the other two survivors. Her story begins and ends in Bloomsbury, because she was raised in an upper middle-class Edwardian family in Bedford Square, the youngest of a large family which also included her sister Ray Marshall, the painter (who later married David Garnett). They were friends of both the Stracheys and the Stephens (Virginia Woolf's family) and her education included school at Queen's College, Harley Street (which Katherine Mansfield also attended) then Newnham College Cambridge, where... Read more >>


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3 comments:

skipper said...

Good post Roy, about this endlessly fascinating group of people. Was 'Ray Marshall' a woman? Sonds like the guy who called round to ease my door frame recently.

MANTEX said...

Rachel (Ray) Marshall was Frances Partridge's sister, who married the writer David (Bunny) Garnett. When their marriage hit the rocks, Garnett then married Angelica Bell who was thirty years younger than him. She was also (in genetic truth) the daughter of Duncan Grant, who had been Garnett's lover before she was born.

Is that complex enough for you?

Anonymous said...

laurie said; Rachel died of cancer long before David Garnett married Angelica Bell. It was a heart wrenching time for him and his two boys Richard and William. She died March 25, 1940. He married Angelica May 7, 1942.