Frances Partridge, a diarist and one of the last surviving associates of the unconventional artistic salon that included authors Virginia Woolf and Lytton Strachey, has died at the age of 103.
Born Frances Marshall, she was, through friendship and marriage, an intimate of the so-called Bloomsbury group. The literary set, named after the London neighbourhood where its members socialised, was renowned for its frank and searching prose and its rejection of Victorian values through an unorthodox approach to sex and aesthetics.
For years, Frances was the companion of Ralph Partridge, who was married to painter Dora Carrington, who loved the gay Strachey, who yearned for Ralph Partridge. They all lived together on and off, until Strachey's death from cancer and Carrington's resulting suicide in the early 1930s broke one of the more notorious love circles of the early 20th century. Their curious story was filmed in Carrington (1995), with Emma Thompson in the title role,
Frances and Ralph Partridge then married and turned their home into a salon for fellow pacifists and literary icons, including E.M. Forster.
Frances Partridge was an observer of the romances, illegitimate births and suicides that formed the backdrop of Bloomsbury life. As decades passed, she became the last first-hand authority on the group's mores and traditions. She was known as a sprightly woman who gave generously of her time and alcohol to the many who came to tap her memory.
She could ably mimic how Strachey sat and smoked, details that made her a favourite of Bloomsbury biographers.
She kept private journals and only in the 1970s began a career in autobiography. Among her books: A Pacifist's War, Love in Bloomsbury, Everything to Lose, Hanging On, Good Company, Other People, Life Regained, and Ups and Downs. She also wrote Julia (1983), a biography of Julia Strachey, her childhood friend and niece of Lytton Strachey.
In journals and interviews, Partridge described the delight she took in Bloomsbury life, from nude swims to long country walks to probing conversations.
Partridge, a native Londoner, was the last of six children born to an architect/amateur athlete and a suffragette. She grew up admiring her family's friends, including Henry James, Arthur Conan Doyle and the critic Roger Fry. She was a graduate of Cambridge University, where she studied philosophy, psychology and ethics. She also was an enthusiastic dancer and paired once during her college years with Lord Louis Mountbatten.
After graduation, she worked in a bookshop operated by Francis Birrell and David Garnett which was a favourite of Bloomsbury writers, and she became a regular weekend guest at their homes.
At one gathering, she met Ralph Partridge, a first World War hero, former Oxford University oarsman and employee of the Hogarth Press run by Leonard and Virginia Woolf. Ham Spray, near Cambridge, was their home till 1960, when Ralph Partridge died. Neither wished to achieve very much except to create their own brand of happiness and spread it to their friends. Together they did a vast amount of work to help Lytton Strachey edit the unexpurgated edition of the memoirs of the 19th-century political diarist Charles Greville, publishing it in eight volumes in 1938, and Ralph had worked for a time with the Woolfs as an assistant at the Hogarth Press.
Their son, Burgo, died in 1963 after a heart attack. Devastated, Frances Partridge worked quietly translating books and playing violin in an amateur orchestra until revisiting her journals became the major work of her life.
She was never a scintillating woman. That was not her style. She was intelligent and lively, emotionally well-balanced, and she lubricated conversation by her eager attentiveness, her sweetness of manner, her "niceness" in a competitive world where that very quality was suspect and the word taboo.
Frances Catherine Partridge: born March 28th, 1900; died February 5th, 2004