Letters and Extracts from Her Diaries (Oxford Letters and Memoirs)

by Dora Carrington and David Garnett

Book Overview

Dora Carrington was considered an outsider to Bloomsbury, but she lived right at its heart. Known only by her surname, she was the star of her year at the Slade School of Fine Art, but never achieved... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0192812645
• ISBN13: 9780192812643
• Release Date: November 1979
• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Length: 516 Pages
• Weight: 1.05 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Pray worthy poet do not laugh at this somewhat curious scarf

This book is hard to come by but well worth the hunt and still a favourite of mine. Carrington is one of the most interesting and multifaceted characters Ive ever read about.She could be called an early '20th century eccentric','Slade school artist','Lytton Strachey's sidekick' but none of those titles do her justice.She was a real outsider in that she belonged neither in the pompous unconventional bloomsbury clique to which she was associated nor belonged in the dull drom conventions of the middle classes to which she was raised,but somewhere of her own making. As a woman she was modern for her time,and her letters show that she was in constant confusion about her place and role as a woman.But I would call this a very womanly book ,Carrington is deeply feminine in her emotional weight,passivity and homeyness,but in many ways she was'nt and is always contridictory. Throughout the book her entries are full of self doubts and fustrations as well as strong convictions.She is elated one letter and painfully distressed the next,She ends up sounding like a sort of amusing manic depressive,always humourous and entertaining with her own little carringtonisms. In her letters to long time friend and admirer Gerald Brenan and former boyfriend noted artist Mark Gertler she is apologetic and wonderfully emotional in her regrets and anger at her inability to love either of them.That is the core of carrington which prevails in her letters that she was so honest and true to herself in every single regard especially to her thoughts and feelings even if it worked against her,as was mostly the case. She is remembered as lytton strachey's devoted 'companion' and as an artist but carrington as this book shows deserves much more than that.She was a wonderful and I think undervalued writer,her letters have a terrific wit and originality of language and she a truth and rarity of character which I've never read before.