Carrington: A Life

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 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 show more 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

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.