Book review: Frances Partridge

The saying that the Bloomsbury group "lived in squares and loved in triangles" does not begin to do justice to their tangled love lives, said Caroline Moore in the Sunday Telegraph.

The "fascination" of this biography of the diarist Frances Partridge "is partly in discovering how Bloomsbury's most warm and straight-forwardly monogamous participant survived the oddest of love quadrangles".

Frances Marshall was born into a "progressive" Victorian family in 1900; after leaving Cambridge she met Ralph Partridge, a handsome WWI hero turned pacifist, who was living in a ménage à trois with the writer Lytton Strachey and the artist Dora Carrington: Carrington was besotted with Strachey, who was "obsessed by the masculine beauty of Ralph, who was, according to Frances, 'hopelessly heterosexual'".

The narcissistic antics of the Bloomsbury group scarcely need another airing

Ralph and Frances fell in love; but Strachey said that if Ralph left him, he would leave Carrington, who would then kill herself. So an agreement was reached whereby the couple lived in Bloomsbury during the week and in Ham Spray, the Wiltshire house inhabited by Carrington and Strachey, at weekends.

"The narcissistic shenanigans of the Bloomsbury group scarcely need another airing," said John Carey in the Sunday Times, "and anyone keen to know about them will have read Frances Partridge's diaries."

The story has already been dissected ad nauseam - the strains in this complex relationship, Carrington's eventual suicide, and Ralph's many affairs (which, as a devotee of free love, he discussed in detail with his wife).

However, in this book, Anne Chisholm reveals some undeniably interesting new details about the group's "bitchiness and affectation", and the damage they did to those in their "orbit". Like their friends, the Partridges saw children "as a tedious distraction from adult pursuits": their son Burgo was brought up by nannies in another part of the house.

They went away on long holidays without him, and when he did see his parents he was told to address them as Frances and Ralph rather than mummy and daddy. He grew up "seriously disturbed. Prone to fits of hysterical weeping, he was afflicted with the belief that his parents were dead, and was once found digging graves for them in a wood."

Frances may have been "a less than perfect parent", said Diana Athill in the Guardian, but "she was an extraordinarily strong and attractive person". It is "proof of Chisholm's sympathy and skill "that one reads through avidly to the end of her long life (she died aged 103), and ends up "grateful for knowing her so well".
Frances Partridge by Anne Chisholm, 416pp (Weidenfeld, £25). The Week Bookshop £22.50 (inc p&p) ·