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CARRINGTON: Letters and Extracts from Her Diaries by David -- Ed. Garnett

CARRINGTON: Letters and Extracts from Her Diaries

By

Pub Date: April 12th, 1971
Publisher: Holt, Rinehart & Winston

These letters and excerpts from the diaries of the painter and devoted companion/sometime lover of Lytton Strachey seem to have been written with the ""little gasps"" with which, Aldous Huxley noted, she punctuated her words -- brief, mostly desperately entertaining bursts of affection and confidences to friends, lovers and Lytton. Carrington illustrated her vast flutter of letters with delightful drawings, and she seemed to have been making a giant effort to amuse. There are witty views of houses and kitchens, railway passengers and audiences, cats and country lanes, and people (Osbert Sitwell ""lying on two chairs surrounded by silk shawls and cushions, writing poetry on a large sheet of paper""). Carrington had occasional troubled liaisons and fell into marriage with Ralph Partridge. But Lytton was the focus of her life; their early love affair evolved into an adoring Platonic relationship mainly because of Lytton's homosexual proclivities and Carrington's own insecure femininity. Following his death, she took her own life. Shortly before she died she wrote: ""One cannot live on memories when the point of one's whole life was the interchange of love, ideas and conversation."" This childlike, talented and immensely vulnerable woman's need for that interchange is reflected in these letters. With a sensitive introduction by David Garnett to whom two of the letters were written, and illustrated with photographs and black-and-white versions of a few Carrington paintings.