Dora de Houghton Carrington was born on 29 March 1893 at Hereford. She was the daughter of a Liverpool merchant and was brought up in Bedford. She attended a girls’ high school which placed a strong emphasis on art and her parents paid for her to take lessons in drawing. She won a scholarship to the Slade and studied under Henry Tonks. There, she met the brothers Paul and John Nash, Christopher Nevinson and Mark Gertler. All at one time or another were in love with her. John Nash aroused her interest in wood-engraving and Mark Gertler’s powerful figure paintings influenced her own approach to portraiture. She did well at the Slade, winning several prizes and moving quickly through the courses. Gertler introduced her to the society hostess Lady Ottoline Morrell, and thus into the Bloomsbury Group. It was while visiting Morrell at Garsington Manor in 1915, that Carrington was introduced to the writer Lytton Strachey. Given that he was a life-long predatory homosexual, Gertler felt he could safely encourage the friendship. Unfortunately, Carrington fell deeply in love with him. In 1917 Carrington ended her relationship with Gertler and went to live with Strachey, firstly at Tidmarsh Mill, near Pangbourne, Berks, then at Ham Spray, between Newbury and Hungerford, Berkshire. Carrington’s father died in 1918, leaving her a small inheritance which afforded her some measure of independence. The following year, she met Ralph Partridge, an Oxford friend of her younger brother Noel, who assisted Leonard Woolf at the Hogarth Press. He had fought in the Great War, made major at 23, and had been awarded the Military Cross for bravery. Both Carrington and Strachey fell in love with Partridge, who accepted that she would not give up her relationship with Strachey. Carrington helped matters along by informing Strachey that Partridge’s private parts were énorme. She married Partridge in 1921, and all three went on the honeymoon to Venice. Strachey observed: ‘everything is at sixes and sevens – ladies in love with buggers and buggers in love with womanisers, and the price of coal going up too. Where will it all end?’ The happy ménage à trois dwelt in harmony at Ham Spray and Carrington turned her attention to decorative work, emulating Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant, but in a style more native in inspiration and more naive. She divided her time between looking after Strachey and her own art work. Her decision was somewhat ironic, given her early rebellion against traditional roles for women in her day. The decision might have also robbed her of time for her own art, although by her own account, she was only happy when domestically settled. In 1923, Frances Marshall appeared on the scene, having fallen in love with Partridge and the household became an awkward ménage à quatre. Even though she was a founding member of Roger Fry’s ill-fated Omega Workshop enterprise, Carrington painted only for her own pleasure, did not sign her works, and rarely exhibited. She made woodcuts for the Hogarth Press, founded by Leonard and Virginia Woolf. She painted on almost any medium she could find, including glass, tiles, pub signs, the walls of friends’ homes, decorated furniture and designed the library at Ham Spray. Meanwhile, she had an affair with Gerald Brenan, who was an old army friend of Ralph Partridge. Brenan moved to southern Spain, where the three of them visited him. In 1925 Carrington met Julia Strachey, Lytton’s niece and a novelist who had once been a Parisian model and an art student at the Slade. Julia frequently visited Ham Spray and though she was married to Stephen Tomlin, she briefly became Carrington’s lover. In 1926 Ralph Partridge commenced an affair with Frances Marshall, and went to live with her in London. That more or less ended his marriage to Carrington, although he visited most weekends. In 1928 Carrington met Bernard Penrose, a friend of Partridge’s and the younger brother of the artist Roland Penrose. She experienced renewed creativity while she had an affair with him, and collaborated with him on the making of three films. However, he wanted Carrington to make an exclusive commitment to him, a demand she refused, because she would not end her relationship with Strachey. The affair, her last with a man, ended when she became pregnant and chose to have an abortion. In November 1931 Strachey became violently ill and in late December, he took a turn for the worse. Carrington attempted suicide by shutting herself in the garage with a car engine running, but Partridge rescued her and she recovered enough to spend the last few days of Strachey’s life, taking her turn in nursing him. He died from stomach cancer on 21 January 1932. Carrington succumbed to depression, borrowed a shotgun from a neighbour and killed herself on 11 March that same year. Ralph and Frances married on 2 March 1933. They lived happily at Ham Spray until Ralph’s death in 1960. A prolific author, and diarist, Frances Partridge died in February 2004.