LYTTON STRACHEY’S BOOKPLATES WHICH WERE DESIGNED BY DORA CARRINGTON [STRACHEY (Lytton, 1880-1932, critic and biographer, member of the Bloomsbury group) and Dora CARRINGTON (Dora de Houghton, Mrs Ralph Partridge, 1893-1932, British painter, closely associated with the Bloomsbury Group)]

The two volume edition of ‘The Genuine Remains in verse and prose of Mr Samuel Buter, author of Hudibras’ with notes by R. Thyer, 2 volumes 8vo., printed for J. and T. Tonson, 1769, bound in contemporary speckled calf with bookplates on the upper board of each volume, 2” x 1½”, no date overall toning and occasional offsetting, joints cracked, rubbed

This bookplate is item 255 in Brian North Lee's "British Bookplates", 1979. Strachey used this label which was designed by his friend Dora Carrington. She studied at the Slade, became an artist and decorator, and with her husband kept house for Strachey at Tidmarsh and Ham Spray. Carrington was not a member of the Bloomsbury Group, though she was closely associated with Bloomsbury and, more generally, with "Bohemian" attitudes, through her long relationship wit Lytton Strachey, whom she first met in 1916. Distinguished by her cropped pageboy hair style (before it was fashionable) and somewhat androgynous appearance, she was troubled by her sexuality; she is known to have had at least one lesbian affair (with Henrietta Bingham). She also had a significant relationship with the writer Gerald Brenan. In June 1918 Virginia Woolf wrote of Carrington in her diary: "She is odd from her mixture of impulse & self consciousness. I wonder sometimes what she’s at: so eager to please, conciliatory, restless, & active.... [B]ut she is such a bustling eager creature, so red & solid, & at the same time inquisitive, that one can’t help liking her." Carrington first set up house with Lytton Strachey in November 1917, when they moved together to Tidmarsh Mill House, near Pangbourne, Berkshire. Ralph Partridge joined the household and eventually, in 1921, Carrington agreed to marry him, not for love but to hold the three-sided relationship together. The three moved to Ham Spray House, Wiltshire in 1924, the home having been purchased by Strachey in the name of Partridge. Strachey died of cancer at Ham Spray in January 1932. Carrington, who saw no purpose in a life without Strachey, committed suicide two months later by shooting herself with a gun borrowed from her friend, Hon. Bryan Guinness (later 2nd Baron Moyne).

Item Date:  0

Stock No:  42219      £250

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