Gretchen Gerzina

My thoughts and comments:

I just read a beautiful biography on Dora Carrington entitled "Carrington: A Life" by Gretchen Holbrook Gerzina. This book was a wonderful study of a fascinating woman who lived on the cusp of the "Bloomsbury Group"; not quite within but not quite without. She was a painter and did mainly stills that are quite different but beautiful. She spent her adult life loving and in love with Lytton Strachey, who was a homosexual. He loved her madly as well, but not show more romantically. And they continued those feelings right to the end.
She did marry but felt very coerced into it. And she had affairs; one of which was with another woman. But I don't believe that she was a lesbian. She just love Strachey so much and couldn't have him romantically. They did share a house and it was quite an open house with other artists & "Bloomsburies" coming and going at all times.
If you like bios of artists of any kind and are not turned off by the homosexual aspect (which I was not), I think you would like/love this book. show less

Bought 12 Dec 2008 - The Works

Biography of the author. At pains to explain she was not just a children's writer (I have The Shuttle on my TBR although I'm worrying that it's much darker than I'd realised now I've read the biog), this also goes to great pains to record every year of the subject's life. There are a few clunky passages and while workmanlike, it didn't really set me alight and looking to gallop through it, like a good biography can for me (cf Cecil Beaton or any of the show more Holroyds)

But a well researched and put together book with a lot of information and great photographs. show less

Unimpressed by Gerzina as a biographer - judgemental and not beautifully written. But the fascination of Carrington's life is there.

Connections, connections, connections. I am going from one biography to the next, each connected to the one before and the one after through a lover, a sibling, a group like Bloomsbury, type of lifestyle, political affiliation, ancestors and marital connections. The arts, the literati and what most of them have in common is....they were prolific letter writers, journal/diary keepers, they painted each other, they wrote biographies of each other and they gossiped.