Carrington’s Letters: Dora Carrington, Her Art, Her Loves, Her Friendships edited by Anne Chisholm

LUCY LETHBRIDGE Carrington’s Letters: Dora Carrington, Her Art, Her Loves, Her Friendships Edited by Anne Chisholm Chatto & Windus £30 Oldie price £19.54 inc p&p

An enduring fascination with the Bloomsbury Group occupies an intriguing side chapel in contemporary British culture. It isn’t about the work. Keynes is back in fashion and Virginia Woolf firmly on the curriculum – but who now reads Saxon Sydney-turner, Clive Bell or even Lytton Strachey? It is

the Bloomsberries’ invigoratingly unorthodox attitude to sex, intellectual camaraderie and what Anne Chisholm in this selection of the letters of the artist Dora Carrington calls their ‘art of living’, that still draw pilgrims to the shrine.

Carrington’s misspelt, warm, dashed-off, funny letters portray a life filled with reading, correspondence, long walks, long chats – and domestic accomplishment. Above all, they are about the seething intensity of her sexual (or not so sexual) relationships, which orbited like satellites the central planet of Strachey, the homosexual to whom she entirely made over her life.

There is relatively little in Carrington’s letters about her painting, and what there is seems mostly to concern her inability to find the time to get down to it. Hardly surprising, given how many hours were spent keeping the artist Mark Gertler dangling, reeling in handsome Ralph

Partridge and keeping his friend Gerald Brenan on the boil. Looking after the demandingly hypochondriacal Strachey (she described his work and domestic routines as being as unvarying as that of their chickens) enslaved her. In 1921, she wrote, ‘Do you remember those plaintive pen wipers made of red & blue felt with jagged edges, with “use me” embroidered in green on the cover. That’s what I would like you to remember, that I am always your pen wiper.’ The reward for her submission was, she wrote, ‘amazing conversations. I mean not to do with this world, but about attitudes and states of mind, and the purpose of living.’

Carrington, with her golden bob, in breeches and men’s boots, pigeon-toed, breathy-voiced and with a bracing (if inconsistent) contempt for social mores, was attractive to both men and women – and had affairs with both.

Her bright, warm, decorative