Carrington: A Life

by Gretchen Holbrook Gerzina

Overview

“As richly textured as a novel, and as full of idiosyncrasy, pleasure, and pathos as real life. The author has done a wonderful job of conjuring, and Dora Carrington’s story is vivid and moving.” —Meg Wolitzer

Here is an absorbing biography of the English artist Dora Carrington, who called herself simply "Carrington". She was a woman who made a vivid impression on those she met—she was portrayed (or caricatured), for example, in novels by Wyndham Lewis, D. H. Lawrence, and Aldous Huxley. Hopelessly in love with the noted writer Lytton Strachey, she achieved notoriety by killing herself shortly after his death. A talented painter, living a bohemian life, Carrington was torn by conflicts as an artist and a woman, including the shrewd and inquisitive Bloomsbury group. Carrington’s paintings, however, reveal much of her remarkable and original cast of mind, and since her death her reputation as an artist has grown steadily. Her work is new represented in major collections worldwide.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393313284
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	09/17/1995
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	384
Product dimensions:	6.20(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Gretchen Holbrook Gerzina is a professor of English at Dartmouth College. She is the author of Frances Hodgson Burnett, Black London, Carrington, Looking for Bijah and Lucy, and editor of The Annotated Secret Garden. She lives near Hanover, New Hampshire.

Editorial Reviews

Gerzina's biography--the first to consider Carrington at length--is an engrossing and well-researched account of the British painter and her era. Carrington was 17 in 1910 when she left her home in provincial Bedford to study in London and, a few years later, she began a longstanding association with the Bloomsbury group. Though seemingly a free spirit, she was fundamentally asexual, making seductive overtures to men yet refusing to make love with them; she clung to these platonic relationships throughout her short life. In her 30s, she engaged in two lesbian love affairs but committed herself emotionally to homosexual Lytton Strachey, living with him from 1916 onward. When the author died of cancer in 1932, she committed suicide. Gerzina, who teaches at Skidmore College, offers a welcome addition to the burgeoning literature on the Bloomsburyans. Photos not seen by PW. (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

A peripheral member of Bloomsbury, Carrington was a painter who did not produce many works, exhibited little, and remained dissatisfied with her abilities. Her artistic reputation, in fact, has been subsumed by her tortured love for critic Lytton Strachey and several other prominent figures of the time. This biography attempts to sort out facts and fictions about a woman who defied conventions only to destroy herself through failed passions. It discusses the artist's career briefly but intelligently, from her enrollment at the Slade School of Fine Art to her work in decorative art near the end of her life. But the real task is to unravel the complicated strands of Carrington's relationships, which are reappraised through examination of letters, diaries, sketches, and literary appropriations. Of interest to general and academic readers, but with so little literature about her, Carrington's art and inspirations require further investigation.-- Paula A. Baxter, NYPL

Library Journal