DOROTHY CARRINGTON: , Frederica Dorothy Violet Carrington, who died in Ajaccio on January 25th aged 91, was known by three different names. To the poets, historians and Corsican intellectuals who were her closest friends she was Frederica, in honour of her father, General Sir Frederick Carrington, who made his career crushing colonial rebellions in Africa at the end of the 19th century.
To the British and Corsican publishers who paid her meagrely for more than a half dozen books on travel, the history and superstitions of Corsica and Napoleon's family, she was the writer Dorothy Carrington. But to the shopkeepers, waiters, shepherds and ordinary people of Corsica, she was Lady Rose, the title she kept from her marriage to the British surrealist painter Sir Francis Rose. Le Monde described her as "one of the most endearing figures of contemporary Corsica".
Her birth on June 6th, 1910, was considered a miracle, after doctors advised her mother, the artist Susan Elwes, to have a second child in the hope it might cure her cancer. Her mother's disease was, she said, "the happiness and the misfortune of my life". Orphaned at 10, she grew up in a girls' school in Gloucestershire, an experience that left her attentive to others but reserved about her own private life.
She met an impoverished Austrian aristocrat named Franz von Walschutz, whom she described as "the most handsome man imaginable" and an excellent horseback rider. She abandoned her English studies at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford. The Carrington uncles caught up with the young couple in Paris, and forced them to marry. They went to his family's tobacco plantation in what was then Rhodesia. Although she enjoyed big game hunting, she was intellectually bored.
She divorced her husband and returned to England, where she married Darcy Sproul-Bolton. He died in the late 1930s. She was a volunteer nurse during the second World War - as well as a model for fashion magazines. She opened an art gallery in London where she showed Sir Francis Rose's surrealist paintings. He invited her to dinner in the docklands on the night they met, and proposed to her the same evening.
In the 1940s, Sir Francis and Lady Rose frequented a cosmopolitan, artistic crowd which included Picasso and the American writer and millionairess Gertrude Stein. He held a joint exhibition with Salvador Dali, who tried to seduce Dorothy Carrington, "in vain", she said. Sir Francis was bi-sexual and they separated after she moved permanently to Corsica in 1952. They divorced in 1966.
Dorothy Carrington was introduced to Corsica by Jean Cesari, a former aide to de Gaulle. In a 1995 interview, Cesari described how she explored the island, dressed in rope espadrilles and short trousers. "She climbed like a goat. Nothing could stop her, neither stone walls nor thickets of barbary figs."
In Corsica, she found "that part of the absolute which I had searched for since childhood". She claimed that European sculpture and democracy both originated in Corsica. She made the megalithic equestrian statues of Filitosa known around the world, and learned Toscan to write the first modern translation of Pascal Paoli's 1755 constitution.
She lectured at universities in Europe, the US and the Soviet Union. The French made her a Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 1986, and the University of Corte gave her its first honorary doctorate in 1991. She became a MBE in 1995. Her most successful book, Granite Island, won the Heineman Prize in 1971 and was republished in Paris two years ago as Corse, île de granit.
She lived for 40 years in a small sixth-floor apartment with a terrace overlooking Ajaccio. At 80 she moved to a first-floor flat above a garden of mandarine trees in the Cours Napoleon, the city's main boulevard. One of her last battles was to save the Corsican villa where Matisse spent his honeymoon from property developers.
Friends speak of her as a beautiful woman, even in old age, with immense energy and curiosity and a compulsion to write. Until a few months before her death, she took breakfast every morning at the same cafe, then went home to work on an old typewriter. Her last book, a portrait of Napoleon Bonaparte's father Charles, based on his original writings, will be published next month.
Frederica Dorothy Violet Carrington (Frederica, Lady Rose): born 1910; died, January 2002