Henrietta Garnett
Scion of the Bloomsbury set who overcame a troubled childhood to become an acclaimed biographer
HENRIETTA GARNETT, who has died of cancer aged 74, was a thirdgeneration product of Bloomsbury, and as the daughter of Angelica and David Garnett inherited a complex legacy of interlocking sexual and artistic relationships.
Her life, like that of her three sisters, was marked by unresolved conflicts arising from their family’s emotional heritage. Yet after love affairs, marriages, an attempted suicide and years of nomadic wandering, Henrietta eventually found her feet as a biographer.
Henrietta Catherine Garnett was born on May 15 1945, the second of her parents’ four daughters. Her mother, Angelica, the daughter of the artist Vanessa Bell and niece of Virginia Woolf, believed her father to be her mother’s husband Clive Bell – until the age of 17, when Vanessa informed Angelica that she was the daughter of the artist and designer Duncan Grant, but forbade her to mention the subject ever again.
To complicate matters further, Angelica’s husband, David Garnett, a writer and publisher known as “Bunny”, was a serial philanderer and bisexual who had enjoyed a youthful affair with Grant. Angelica was unaware of this when she married Bunny in 1942 after the death of his first wife, Ray Marshall, the sister of another Bloomsbury set member, the diarist Frances Partridge. Angelica was 24; her husband was 50.
Bunny (who described life in the Bloomsbury set as “A eating his heart out vainly for B; B breaking hers in vain for C, and so on in interminable interlocking circles of frustration”) took Angelica back to Hilton Hall, a Jacobean manor house in a village just outside St Ives in Cambridgeshire, where their four daughters were brought up.
Unsurprisingly the marriage was not a success. Angelica recalled in her autobiography, Deceived With Kindness, that it was when she had four daughters under five that she realised it had been a disastrous mistake. Bunny, she claimed, often succumbed to “shattering rages which, disconcertingly and tragically, often involved the children.” They would only separate, however, after the children had grown up.
The girls were sent to be educated at Huntingdon Grammar School, where a contemporary, Liz Hodgkinson, writing in the Daily Mail in 2012, recalled them as precociously talented and wildly unconventional, but also ethereal and out of reach.
Henrietta’s older sister Amaryllis was shy and reserved, but with an anarchic streak, while Henrietta was “darkhaired, flamboyant and sexy: very much like her grandfather … Duncan Grant”.
Both girls spoke fluent French and were gifted at art and literature. Except for Liz Hodgkinson and a few others, most of their fellow pupils avoided them.
Holidays were mostly spent at Charleston, the country home in East Sussex shared by Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant, where Henrietta and her sisters sat for their portraits, and which provided an element of calm and stability in Henrietta’s rollercoaster life.
Henrietta, a noted beauty, claimed that from the age of 10 she had been always in love, and towards the end of her time at school she acquired a secret boyfriend in London: Burgo Partridge, 10 years her senior, the only son of Frances and Ralph Partridge and the author of a book called A History of Orgies. They married in December 1962, when Henrietta was 17, and within a year they had a daughter, Sophie.
A month after the birth, however, Burgo dropped dead in front of Henrietta after suffering an aortic aneurysm. It would take her many years to get back on track, years during which she led a gipsy life, leaving others to look after Sophie.
After a period enjoying the nightlife of Marbella, she joined a group of aristocratic dropouts – “chequebook hippies”, she later called them – touring the British countryside in painted caravans. There were numerous boyfriends and two more marriages. Like her older sister Amaryllis, Henrietta experienced bouts of debilitating depression and in 1977 attempted suicide by jumping from the roof of a London hotel, sustaining serious injuries.
Amaryllis, after a brief period as an actress (including a small part in Joseph Losey’s and Harold Pinter’s film adaptation of The Go-between), had drowned four years earlier, aged 29, off the Thames house boat on which she was living in Chelsea, in what was generally assumed to be a suicide.
After her parents parted company, both moved to separate establishments in the south of France, where they were often visited by Henrietta. She recalled evenings sitting up with Bunny by the fire drinking, talking about life and art, sometimes reading to each other. “He talked of his mistresses and, with deep love, of both his marriages. He continued to speak with the feelings of a much younger man,” she recalled. She was proud to be his daughter.
She made her debut as a writer in 1986 with Family Skeletons which, to the disappointment of some, was not a family memoir, but a Gothic novel with elements of autobiography, with a fey, wispy heroine who loses both her husband and her mind, but not before she is raped by her guardian, who dies in a fire after the real truth of her parentage is revealed. One reviewer, while acknowledging it as well-written, dismissed it as “not much better than a supermarket-rack romance novel”.
In 1990 Henrietta moved to France with Mark Divall, who had been the gardener at Charleston, and they remained there for the next 12 years, she pursuing her writing while Mark did gardening work for British expat clients. But the relationship did not last and in 2001 Henrietta returned to Britain, moving into a mews house in Chelsea, and later adding a cottage in Sussex.
She had better luck as a biographer than as a novelist, her Anny: A Life of Anne Thackeray Ritchie (2004) winning enthusiastic reviews. As well as being a novelist, memoir-writer and editor of the works of her father, WM Thackeray, Anny was the sister-in-law of Henrietta’s maternal great-grandfather, Leslie Stephen. The Telegraph reviewer Claudia Fitzherbert found the book “enchanting”.
Wives and Stunners: The Pre-raphaelites and Their Muses (2012) was perhaps less successful, one critic observing that the author’s own upbringing among the group, which arguably picked up the baton where the Preraphaelites dropped it, should have made her well-placed to understand them, but regretting that she seemed “reluctant to trust her own background or instincts … preferring to rely on secondary sources.”
Despite everything that life threw at her, Henrietta Garnett remained a great beauty and never displayed an ounce of self-pity. After her death, her cousin Virginia Nicholson wrote: “In many ways, she exemplified the essence of Bloomsbury: a free and courageous spirit, a natural Bohemian, talented and graceful … she would have wished us all to carry on and enjoy the party.”
Henrietta Garnett is survived by her daughter.