Description
Book SynopsisCarrington's beguiling letters take us beyond the Bloomsbury group to discuss sexual mores, how to be an artist, and what it is to be truly oneself.
Known only by her surname, Dora Carrington was the star of her year at the Slade School of Fine Art, and was friends with some of the greatest minds of her day, including Virginia Woolf, Rosamund Lehmann and Maynard Keynes.
For over a decade she was the companion of homosexual writer Lytton Strachey, and - stricken without him- killed herself when he died in 1932. Though she never achieved the fame her early career promised, in her determination to live life according to her own nature – especially in relation to her work and her fluid attitude to sex, gender and sexuality – she fought battles that remain familiar and urgent today.
Now, through her passionate, playful and honest letters, we can encounter the maverick artist and compelling personality afresh and in her own words.
Trade ReviewThough Virginia and Vanessa, Clive and Bertie, Bunny and Roger all feature, this is much more than another tribute to the tribe -- Michael Bird * Daily Telegraph *
Chisholm’s masterstoke is to celebrate the letter as artwork… Letters are, of course, a site of aesthetic experiment and creativity, and to view them as such permits the artistry of the fragment to stand, enabling the collage collection to tell other stories of form and function -- Amber K. Regis * Times Literary Supplement *
