Ralph’s vitality was under-used. He was practical: he evidently kept the family finances (to the reader, mysterious) afloat. Had he pursued a professional career, he would not have needed so many romantic diversions and might have felt more at ease with himself; he might, some said, have done more for Frances. She, however, felt he was misunderstood and before she died asked Anne Chisholm, when writing this biography, to ‘get Ralph right. No one ever has.’
One has the feeling that though the book shows him to have been more intelligent, cultivated and generous-hearted than many members of Bloomsbury or their biographers have allowed, Anne Chisholm nonetheless fails to warm to him. I had to remind myself that my parents, albeit critical of the Partridges’ theories about the rearing of children, always spoke of him with fondness and admiration — unthinkable had he been simply the self-indulgent figure who, inadvertently perhaps, emerges from this book. In judging him, one has to remember, too, the long-term damage that the Great War did to so many of its survivors like Ralph; Frances understood this and forgave, and the blind eye she apparently turned to his infidelities had a constructive and healing purpose; for what object was there in condemning a man who needed her and who was, all things considered, a marvellous and supportive companion?
Suffering deeply from the loss of Ralph in 1960 and their only son Burgo’s death three years later, Frances struggled at the age of 63 to recover, living for another 40 years. She was to achieve renown as a diarist and writer of memoirs when she discovered, in publication, a therapy for her grief. Along the way she gathered, as always, an ever-widening circle of friends of all ages. Her humour and warm-heartedness, more evident in real life than in the often oddly censorious tone of her journals, and the rationalism she could carry to bizarre extremes, in (for example) her disapproval of funerals, wakes and gravestones — to the extent of dispensing of these altogether for Ralph and Burgo — are well conveyed in Anne Chisholm’s thought-provoking portrait of a remarkable, lovable woman.
Comments
There are currently no comments for this article.