Product Description

Frances Partridge was one of the great British diarists of the 20th century. She was born in 1900, the daughter of a progressive mother and architect father whose friends included Henry James and Arthur Conan Doyle. After studying Moral Sciences and English at Cambridge, Frances worked in Francis Birrell and Bunny Garnett's bookshop in London. She soon became part of the Bloomsbury group encountering Virginia Woolf, Lytton Strachey, the Bells, Roger Fry, Maynard Keynes, Dora Carrington and Ralph Partridge. She and Ralph fell in love and married in 1933. During the Second World War they were committed pacifists and opened their house, Ham Spray, to numerous waifs and strays of war. After it was over they enjoyed the happiest times of their lives together, entertaining friends such as E.M. Forster, Robert Kee and Duncan Grant. Frances' life changed abruptly with two sudden and unexpected deaths. Ralph had a heart attack in 1960 and three years later their only son, Burgo, died aged 28 from a brain haemorrhage. 'I have utterly lost heart: I want no more of this cruel life,' Frances was to write later. However, she survived, indeed prospered, for another four decades, showing an astonishing appetite for life. Her diaries (which she continued to write until her death in 2004) chronicle her life from the 1930s onwards. Their publication brought her recognition and acclaim, and earned her the right to be seen not as a minor character on the Bloomsbury stage but standing at the centre of her own.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #14120 in Books
• Published on: 2009-04-09
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 416 pages

Review
"Anne Chisholm's book promises to be the best kind of biography - intimate and particular, but with a watchful eye on the larger picture" (Kathryn Hughes THE GUARDIAN )

"an outstanding biography, intelligent, sympathetic and beautifully written" (Selina Hastings STANDPOINT )

"an impressively sure-footed biography and the necessary complement to the published diaries" (Frances Spalding LITERARY REVIEW )

Book of the Week: "Anne Chisholm could not have presented her life better" (David Sexton EVENING STANDARD )

"Chisholm triumphantly brings Ralph to life on the page, so that we appreciate why the man was so loved by Frances, by Lytton and, briefly, by Carrington" (Paul Levy THE OBSERVER )

"It is Anne Chisholm's remarkable achievement to reveal her fully as the extraordinarily strong and attractive person that she was." (Diana Athill THE GUARDIAN )

"Anne Chisholm's admiration and even love for her subject infuses but does not distort this deft and touching biography" (Caroline Moore SUNDAY TELEGRAPH )

"Anne Chisholm has produced a worthy tribute to the woman often dubbed 'the last survivor of Bloomsbury'". (Mark Bostridge INDEPENDENT ON SUNDAY )

"The book I most enjoyed reading last week was Anne Chisholm's forthcoming biography of the Bloomsbury diarist Frances Partridge" (D J Taylor INDEPENDENT ON SUNDAY )

"This is an absorbing, vivid and elegant account of a life concerned as much with love and friendship as the bold experiments of Bloomsbury" (Matthew Dennison DAILY TELEGRAPH )

"Anne Chisholm could not have presented her better" (David Sexton THE SCOTSMAN )

"Sympathetic, psychologically astute and notable well-written" (D J Taylor THE INDEPENDENT )

"As well as the central character, she has managed to give a remarkable overview of Old Bloomsbury" (John Saumarez Smith COUNTRY LIFE )

"We do genuinely want to follow her right through to the end of her long life, and end up grateful for knowing her so well" (Diana Athill THE BROWN BOOK, LMH COLLEGE, OXFORD )

About the Author
Anne Chisholm is the author of a biography of Nancy Cunard and FACES OF HIROSHIMA, a book about the Hiroshima Maidens. With Michael Davie she wrote BEAVERBROOK: A LIFE (1992). She was a close friend of Frances Partridge during the last years of her life. She reviews widely and is the current chairman of the Royal Society of Literature. She lives in Belsize Park, London and Ewelme, Oxfordshire.

Customer Reviews

Everything comes to he who waits
The arrival of this long-awaited tome was a red letter day. Seized with relish and devoured in several bites, this is a welcome addition for Bloomsbury addicts. It always seemed to me that the objective of the book would primarily be to Set the Record straight about Ralph - but it appears that the record has been pretty straight all along, and he was not really the great, near-perfect hero-figure that Frances Partridge believed him to be, although one can now understand more clearly why she was so profoundly in love with him. So one of my Bloomsbury heroines had, perhaps, after all feet of clay! This doesn't make the book any less interesting, however - meticulously researched and beautifully written, a splendid tribute to a profoundly impressive lady, whose life spanned virtually the whole of the last century.

Bloomsberries
I was very keen to buy this book as soon as it came out - I received it on publication day, in fact. I wanted to find out more about the person behind the marvellous diaries.
It was well written, but I'm not sure that I liked the constant references to Frances's own memories of events, which were presented in a somewhat reverential way, as if her memories must be the true version of what happened. I felt that the shadow of Frances hung over the book, making sure that nothing too emotionally revealing came out.
The book did give me further insight into the tangled web of the Lytton/Carrington/Ralph Partridge/Frances Marshall set-up, but I am none-the-wiser about Frances's reasons for becoming entangled in such a set-up, as I am none-the-wiser about Frances's emotional life, which was, after all, rather strange.
Frances came across on-the-whole as a rather cold fish, and I am still horrified by the account of her sending for Harrods funeral department when her son Burgo died.
The book gives an interesting view of the later members of 'Bloomsbury', and topics such as the relationship between Gerald Brenan and Ralph Partridge, but at the end of the day Frances Partridge just isn't all that interesting in her own right. She was an early female Cambridge graduate who got sucked into the later Bloomsbury world, and the interest lies mainly in the people she mixed with. The domestic details of her family life with Ralph and their son, Burgo, were the closest that I felt I got to the real person.
I enjoyed the book, but I did 'skip' some of the long lists of friends who were entertained by Frances and Ralph.
I enjoyed the bits that were about Carrington, Lytton Strachey and Ralph Partridge much more than the later parts of the book which chronicled Frances's life after Burgo died.
I would recommend it as an account of the later 'Bloomsberries' from a slightly different perspective.

A Diarist Revealed
Hugely enjoyed this evocation of the personality so carefully edited by Frances Partridge in her own inspiring diaries. Thus, her empathy, and her tremendous powers of observation for all the minutiae of life, are tempered by her rigid adherence to pacifism, her total rejection of any kind of religion, and her apparently unrealistic perception of her husband. I wish only that the book could have been longer, but do realise that Anne Chisholm needed to leave the published diaries intact for readers to enjoy in their own right, or indeed to return to them refreshed by this wider perspective. The net result for me, just 70, is to recognise the attitudes and occupations necessary to the pursuit of a worthwhile old age! I have enjoyed also reading Cynthia Kee's novel, A Responsible Man for its (albeit unflattering) portraits of Frances, Ralph and Janetta, and viewing a DVD of the film Carrington. I am currently re-reading Gerald Brenan's edition of Carrington's Diaries and Letters. I must say that Frances Partridge emerges as the sanest and certainly the kindest and absolutely the most inspiring of the whole Bloomsbury package!