Frances Partridge: The Biography by Anne Chisholm

Only at the end of a life that spanned the entire 20th century did Frances Partridge emerge as one of our finest diarists

FRANCES Partridge was the last significant writer of the Bloomsbury Group but far from the least. Born in 1900, she only published the first volume of her diaries, A Pacifist's War, in 1977. "The whole thing seems to me extremely strange," she exclaimed. "To turn author at seventy-seven!" But it was just the start of a surprisingly long literary career. For 24 years, the books came steadily, ending only with Ups and Downs: Diaries 1972-1975, published in 2001, bringing her coverage of her life almost up to the point at which she had begun to make it public.

Frances Partridge's diaries are rivalled in our time only by those of James Lees- Milne (1908-97). But although she knew many extremely interesting people her diaries depend much less than Lees- Milne's on grand social contacts. Most of the friends she talks about most — Julia, Janetta, Magouche and so forth — one knows only from her writing.

In her twenties, she had failed to write short stories, learning that "actual experience is the only thing that seems to stimulate my imagination". And that made her a natural diarist, all the way from her twenties to her seventies.

While still a schoolgirl, she had experienced a revelation that her thoughts were her own — "no one and nothing could make me think against my own grain, or divert my beliefs from their chosen channel" — which remained with her for the rest of her life. It is this core belief that makes her diaries not just companionable and diverting but actually an inspiration to read.

Anne Chisholm, who worked with Frances Partridge near the end of her life, copes well with the fact that her subject's own "detailed, almost daily record" has already been published.

Throughout, her book complements the diaries perfectly — and, while full of affection and admiration, she remains sceptical about such matters as Frances's dogmatic and oddly aggressive pacifism and the confident social assumptions that were never quite eliminated by her progressive political stance (when I interviewed her about the 1995 Dora Carrington biopic, she told me that the actress who played her, Alex Kingston, gave the impression of a housemaid applying for a job).

Frances, as Chisholm shows, "demonstrated, all her life, the benefits — a positive, optimistic outlook on life, emotional security, a certain basic social and intellectual confidence — of being the much loved youngest child of a large, busy, cheerful Victorian professional family". Her father was an architect, her mother an early feminist.

After Bedales — where the roll call of the fallen awoke her horror of war — Frances read moral sciences at Newnham and began to meet some Bloomsbury figures. After graduating in 1921, she started working in Bloomsbury's favourite bookshop, Birrell and Garnett, and encountered many more. She was dark, pretty, slight, sure of herself and loved dancing. In 1923, she met the one great love of her life, Ralph Partridge.

Ralph Partridge, then 28, was a big, strong war veteran who had been made a major at 23 and awarded an MC. After the war, he had returned to Oxford, where, through a school friend, he was inducted into the ménage of Carrington and Lytton Strachey. She was bisexual, he was homosexual; both benefited from such a third party, whose physique they admired but whose intellect they patronised, to Frances's permanent chagrin.

Anne Chisholm deals with this overdescribed tangle, or "triangular trinity of happiness", briskly, adding just a few new explicitnesses. Carrington, she reveals, reported to Strachey that Ralph Partridge's private parts were "énorme" — and she suggests that there was sexual activity between Strachey and Ralph too, although Frances preferred to think it had only been a friendship.

In 1921, Ralph and Carrington married, while continuing to live in a ménage à trois with Strachey. When Frances and Ralph fell in love two years later, she joined them in an awkward ménage à quatre.

In January 1932, Strachey died of cancer. In March, Carrington shot herself. Ralph and Frances took over Ham Spray, the big house on the Downs that Ralph and Strachey had bought together, and Frances, who suffered a miscarriage, became preoccupied with the idea of having a child. She and Ralph married in March 1933; their son Burgo, named after a character in Trollope, was born in 1935. They had sufficient money not to work and to be looked after by servants, living for pleasure.

During the war, both Frances and Ralph remained vehement pacifists.

Even the discoveries at Belsen and Auschwitz did not change Frances's mind. "The world has for several years been one huge atrocity," she commented.

On this matter as no other, her mind was closed, Chisholm says.

The two great tragedies of Frances's life occurred in quick succession. In 1960, her beloved Ralph died of a heart attack. She quickly sold Ham Spray and moved into a rented flat in West Halkin Street in Knightsbridge.

In 1962, Burgo married Henrietta Garnett, then just 17, and in August 1963, they had a daughter, Sophie. Less than a month later, Burgo dropped dead at the age of 28 while talking on the phone, having suffered an aortic aneurysm.

Frances survived even this. She came to the conclusion, says Chisholm, "that her own life was effectively over, the only way ahead for her was to sink herself in the lives of other people". With the publication of Michael Holroyd's biography of Lytton Strachey interest in Bloomsbury revived — and ultimately Frances emerged as one of the most readable writers of the entire movement, not so remarkably gifted as some but more decent, more likeable perhaps, in the end, the most admirable embodiment of its values of rationalism, outspokenness and unconventionality.

Bloomsbury perhaps did not, in the final analysis, produce much art of value. But the diaries of Frances Partridge stand high among its creations — and Anne Chisholm could not have presented her life better.

Synopsis from Foyles.co.uk
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.