Henrietta Garnett (1945–2019)

Henrietta Garnett, one of the four daughters of famed Bloomsbury Group members Angelica and David Garnett, grew up at Hilton Hall, their Jacobean house in Cambridgeshire. Holidays were spent at Charleston, the Sussex farmhouse of her grandparents Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant. In 1962, at age 17, Henrietta married Lytton Burgo Partridge, 10 years her senior, the son of Frances Partridge, a diarist of the Bloomsbury set. The couple had a daughter, Sophie, born in 1963. After her husband died suddenly four weeks afterwards, leaving her a teenage widow, Henrietta plunged into the carefree whirl of the Swinging Sixties. She spent some time with Mark Palmer and a band of aristocratic hippies drifting around Britain in horse-drawn caravans. She married twice more and divorced, and in the 1980s settled in Provence, France. In 2001 she returned to the UK. Henrietta became a writer in middle age. Her first book was a 1986 novel called Family Skeletons. She then wrote several acclaimed biographies, including Anny (2004), a life of Anny Ritchie, the daughter of William Makepeace Thackery, and Wives and Stunners (2012), a group portrait of the muses, models, and mistresses of the pre-Raphaelite artists. She also gave talks about her famous family.