Frances Partridge | Anne Chisholm | Review by The Spectator

For years an intimate friend of my mother Rachel Cecil, Frances Partridge inhabits my memory from early childhood. Before she reached 50, her dark, delicate skin was already seamed with a thousand wrinkles like a very old woman’s, although she remained youthful all her prodigiously long life, retaining an acute power of sympathy. She would ask one searching personal questions and loved arguing, but good-humouredly, despite her strong pacifist and anti-religious convictions which were hotly contested in my home. Her youthfulness showed also in her birdlike gaze and musical, emphatic voice, the hallmark of the Bloomsbury circle with which she was so long associated. My childhood recollections include also her husband Ralph, a barrel-chested, manly presence, florid, pipe between clenched teeth, reputedly a keen nudist.

The Partridges, at their home in Ham Spray, Wiltshire, seem to epitomise a delightful country idyll which quite a few fortunate people, my parents included, enjoyed in the decade before the second world war, despite economic depression and fearsome events in Europe — a literary life enlivened by picnics, bathing in secluded coves, costume balls in country houses thrown by such as Cecil Beaton, and a Wessex landscape still amazingly unsuburbanised, intimate and secret.

Some of this is evoked in the text and photographs in Anne Chisholm’s absorbing book, which is above all the story of a marriage: Frances, although late in life a writer, never had a career, nor did Ralph. They first met in 1922. Ralph was the unhappy husband of the artist Dora Carrington whom he had met on leave during the first world war. He pursued Frances indefatigably (as he did many other women) until he succeeded in persuading her to live with him; Frances accepted the continuance of his marriage to the manipulative Carrington, and their complicated ménage, which included the homosexual Lytton Strachey, Carrington’s great love. After Strachey’s death in 1932 and Carrington’s subsequent suicide, Ralph and Frances were married. Despite what must have seemed an inauspicious beginning, their marriage was singularly successful, in large part thanks to Frances’ judicious outlook and, above all, her lifelong determination to protect her amorous, vulnerable husband from himself and his critics.