NZ Herald
  • Home
  • Latest news
  • Video
  • New Zealand
  • Sport
  • World
  • Business
  • Entertainment
  • Podcasts
  • Quizzes
  • Opinion
  • Lifestyle
  • Travel
  • Viva
  • Weather forecasts

Subscriptions

  • Herald Premium
  • Viva Premium
  • The Listener
  • BusinessDesk

Sections

  • Latest news
  • New Zealand
    • All New Zealand
    • Crime
    • Politics
    • Education
    • Open Justice
    • Scam Update
    • The Great NZ Road Trip
  • On The Up
  • World
    • All World
    • Australia
    • Asia
    • UK
    • United States
    • Middle East
    • Europe
    • Pacific
  • Business
    • All Business
    • MarketsSharesCurrencyCommoditiesStock TakesCrypto
    • Markets with Madison
    • Media Insider
    • Business analysis
    • Personal financeKiwiSaverInterest ratesTaxInvestment
    • EconomyInflationGDPOfficial cash rateEmployment
    • Small business
    • Business reportsMood of the BoardroomProject AucklandSustainable business and financeCapital markets reportAgribusiness reportInfrastructure reportDynamic business
    • Deloitte Top 200 Awards
    • CompaniesAged CareAgribusinessAirlinesBanking and financeConstructionEnergyFreight and logisticsHealthcareManufacturingMedia and MarketingRetailTelecommunicationsTourism
  • Opinion
    • All Opinion
    • Analysis
    • Editorials
    • Business analysis
    • Premium opinion
    • Letters to the editor
  • Sport
    • All Sport
    • OlympicsParalympics
    • RugbySuper RugbyNPCAll BlacksBlack FernsRugby sevensSchool rugby
    • CricketBlack CapsWhite Ferns
    • Racing
    • NetballSilver Ferns
    • LeagueWarriorsNRL
    • FootballWellington PhoenixAuckland FCAll WhitesFootball FernsEnglish Premier League
    • GolfNZ Open
    • MotorsportFormula 1
    • Boxing
    • UFC
    • BasketballNBABreakersTall BlacksTall Ferns
    • Tennis
    • Cycling
    • Athletics
    • SailingAmerica's CupSailGP
    • Rowing
  • Lifestyle
    • All Lifestyle
    • Viva - Food, fashion & beauty
    • Society Insider
    • Royals
    • Sex & relationships
    • Food & drinkRecipesRecipe collectionsRestaurant reviewsRestaurant bookings
    • Health & wellbeing
    • Fashion & beauty
    • Pets & animals
    • The Selection - Shop the trendsShop fashionShop beautyShop entertainmentShop giftsShop home & living
    • Milford's Investing Place
  • Entertainment
    • All Entertainment
    • TV
    • MoviesMovie reviews
    • MusicMusic reviews
    • BooksBook reviews
    • Culture
    • ReviewsBook reviewsMovie reviewsMusic reviewsRestaurant reviews
  • Travel
    • All Travel
    • News
    • New ZealandNorthlandAucklandWellingtonCanterburyOtago / QueenstownNelson-TasmanBest NZ beaches
    • International travelAustraliaPacific IslandsEuropeUKUSAAfricaAsia
    • Rail holidays
    • Cruise holidays
    • Ski holidays
    • Luxury travel
    • Adventure travel
  • Kāhu Māori news
  • Environment
    • All Environment
    • Our Green Future
  • Talanoa Pacific news
  • Property
    • All Property
    • Property Insider
    • Interest rates tracker
    • Residential property listings
    • Commercial property listings
  • Health
  • Technology
    • All Technology
    • AI
    • Social media
  • Rural
    • All Rural
    • Dairy farming
    • Sheep & beef farming
    • Horticulture
    • Animal health
    • Rural business
    • Rural life
    • Rural technology
    • Opinion
    • Audio & podcasts
  • Weather forecasts
    • All Weather forecasts
    • Kaitaia
    • Whangārei
    • Dargaville
    • Auckland
    • Thames
    • Tauranga
    • Hamilton
    • Whakatāne
    • Rotorua
    • Tokoroa
    • Te Kuiti
    • Taumaranui
    • Taupō
    • Gisborne
    • New Plymouth
    • Napier
    • Hastings
    • Dannevirke
    • Whanganui
    • Palmerston North
    • Levin
    • Paraparaumu
    • Masterton
    • Wellington
    • Motueka
    • Nelson
    • Blenheim
    • Westport
    • Reefton
    • Kaikōura
    • Greymouth
    • Hokitika
    • Christchurch
    • Ashburton
    • Timaru
    • Wānaka
    • Oamaru
    • Queenstown
    • Dunedin
    • Gore
    • Invercargill
  • Meet the journalists
  • Promotions & competitions
  • OneRoof property listings
  • Driven car news

Puzzles & Quizzes

  • Puzzles
    • All Puzzles
    • Sudoku
    • Code Cracker
    • Crosswords
    • Cryptic crossword
    • Wordsearch
  • Quizzes
    • All Quizzes
    • Morning quiz
    • Afternoon quiz
    • Sports quiz

Regions

  • Northland
    • All Northland
    • Far North
    • Kaitaia
    • Kerikeri
    • Kaikohe
    • Bay of Islands
    • Whangarei
    • Dargaville
    • Kaipara
    • Mangawhai
  • Auckland
  • Waikato
    • All Waikato
    • Hamilton
    • Coromandel & Hauraki
    • Matamata & Piako
    • Cambridge
    • Te Awamutu
    • Tokoroa & South Waikato
    • Taupō & Tūrangi
  • Bay of Plenty
    • All Bay of Plenty
    • Katikati
    • Tauranga
    • Mount Maunganui
    • Pāpāmoa
    • Te Puke
    • Whakatāne
  • Rotorua
  • Hawke's Bay
    • All Hawke's Bay
    • Napier
    • Hastings
    • Havelock North
    • Central Hawke's Bay
    • Wairoa
  • Taranaki
    • All Taranaki
    • Stratford
    • New Plymouth
    • Hāwera
  • Manawatū - Whanganui
    • All Manawatū - Whanganui
    • Whanganui
    • Palmerston North
    • Manawatū
    • Tararua
    • Horowhenua
  • Wellington
    • All Wellington
    • Kapiti
    • Wairarapa
    • Upper Hutt
    • Lower Hutt
  • Nelson & Tasman
    • All Nelson & Tasman
    • Motueka
    • Nelson
    • Tasman
  • Marlborough
  • West Coast
  • Canterbury
    • All Canterbury
    • Kaikōura
    • Christchurch
    • Ashburton
    • Timaru
  • Otago
    • All Otago
    • Oamaru
    • Dunedin
    • Balclutha
    • Alexandra
    • Queenstown
    • Wanaka
  • Southland
    • All Southland
    • Invercargill
    • Gore
    • Stewart Island
  • Gisborne

Media

  • Video
    • All Video
    • NZ news video
    • Business news video
    • Politics news video
    • Sport video
    • World news video
    • Lifestyle video
    • Entertainment video
    • Travel video
    • Markets with Madison
    • Kea Kids news
  • Podcasts
    • All Podcasts
    • The Front Page
    • On the Tiles
    • Ask me Anything
    • The Little Things
    • Cooking the Books
  • Cartoons
  • Photo galleries
  • Today's Paper - E-editions
  • Photo sales
  • Classifieds

NZME Network

  • Advertise with NZME
  • OneRoof
  • Driven Car Guide
  • BusinessDesk
  • Newstalk ZB
  • What the Actual
  • Sunlive
  • ZM
  • The Hits
  • Coast
  • Radio Hauraki
  • The Alternative Commentary Collective
  • Gold
  • Flava
  • iHeart Radio
  • Hokonui
  • Radio Wanaka
  • iHeartCountry New Zealand
  • Restaurant Hub
  • NZME Events

SubscribeSign In
Advertisement
Advertise with NZME.
Home / Entertainment

Bloomsbury Set archive released

By Andy McSmith
Independent·
18 Mar, 2010 08:43 PM6 mins to read

Subscribe to listen

Access to Herald Premium articles require a Premium subscription. Subscribe now to listen.
Already a subscriber?  Sign in here

Listening to articles is free for open-access content—explore other articles or learn more about text-to-speech.
‌
Save

    Share this article

A letter on the disappearance of writer Virginia Woolf (pictured) is one of the items in the newly released archive. Photo / Supplied

A letter on the disappearance of writer Virginia Woolf (pictured) is one of the items in the newly released archive. Photo / Supplied

They were, according to taste, a fascinating circle of hard-working, free-thinking and gifted intellectuals, or a bunch of dissolute subversives "who lived in squares but loved in triangles".

The Bloomsbury Set continues to fascinate decades after they used to gather in smart houses for sex and sparkling conversation. Scarcely a year passes without another book being published which tries to capture part of their unusual story. Now comes the newest contribution to Bloomsburyana: thousands of pages of correspondence and 30 albums of photographs belonging to two female members of the set, which have been released for public use.

The women are Rosamond Lehmann, a famous figure on the British literary scene between the wars, and the diarist Frances Partridge, who outlived all the others, and was still keeping a diary almost to the day she died, six years ago, at the age of 103.

Although the members of the Bloomsbury Set were brilliant and liberated, they were not all happy. The central figure was Virginia Woolf, who, after her home was bombed in 1941, wrote a note to her husband, Leonard, saying "we can't go through another of those terrible times", filled the pockets of her coat with stones, and walked into a river to drown herself.

One of the items in the newly released archive is a letter to Frances Partridge dated 3 April 1941, five days after Woolf had disappeared, but before her body was found. The writer was the art critic, Clive Bell, who married Woolf's sister Vanessa.

"I'm afraid there is not the slightest doubt that she drowned herself about noon last Friday," he wrote. "She had left letters for Leonard and Vanessa. Her stick and footprints were found by the edge of the river. It became evident some weeks ago that she was in for another of those long and agonising breakdowns of which she had had several already. The prospect of two years insanity, then to wake up to the sort of world which another two years of war will have made, was such that I can't feel sure she was unwise."

Frances Marshall (the future Mrs Partridge) featured in a complex sexual line-up that was not so much a love triangle as a love quadrilateral. The daughter of an architect, William Marshall, she started work in a bookshop after she left Newnham College, Cambridge. Customers included Lytton Strachey, famous for his iconoclastic portraits of famous Victorians, the painter Dora Carrington, and her husband, Ralph Partridge.

The three lived together, in a Wiltshire farmhouse called Ham Spray. Whilst having an occasional affair with one of Ralph's friends, Carrington was desperately in love with Strachey, but Strachey, who was gay, loved Ralph Partridge. Partridge added to the cast by falling in love with the young Frances Marshall. He and she moved into a London house together, unfazed by the detail that he was already married. Strachey died of stomach cancer in 1932, and Carrington, unable to cope with his death, shot herself. Her aim was poor, and she was still alive when Ralph and Frances arrived at Ham Spray a few hours later. She died soon afterwards.

Another of Clive Bell's letters in the newly released archive read: "For me, the final touch of horror seems to be given by the fact that she was still alive and conscious when you arrived. What can it have been like - I'm glad I can't clearly imagine it. This world of tragedy in which my dearest friends are engulfed is only half-real to me because I left England a day or two after Lytton died. Hadn't you and Ralph better get out of it for a bit?"

In fact, Ralph and Frances married the following year and settled at Ham Spray until his death in 1960, after which she returned to London.

Rosamond Lehmann was a year younger than Frances Partridge, and shot to fame in 1927 at the age of 26 with her first novel, Dusty Answer. Not everyone liked her work. The New Yorker critic Brendan Gill said one of her later novels "was flawed because it attempted to blame women's troubles on men, when the real problem (apparently) was something called 'destiny'. [But] women ... have no use for destiny; they wouldn't compose a Hamlet if they could."

She married twice, the second time to Wogan Philipps, the communist son of a wealthy ship owner, later celebrated as the second Baron Milford, the only communist in the House of Lords. The new archive also includes a letter from Lehmann to Frances Partridge, describing a furious argument that Philipps had had with his father in 1932.

"It started with an argument about capital punishment and developed at lightning speed into communism, filthy painting, being in a filthy set, rotten intellectuals, intention of making Wogan squirm and beg for every penny, etc etc. Before we knew where we were, Wogan was presented with a document to sign, agreeing to go into Morris' motorworks as an ordinary mechanic and then go to Russia for six months and find any work he could. Meanwhile another letter was composed to Morris asking him if he would take in Wogan and cure him of communist nonsense."

Uncured, Philipps went to Spain as a volunteer ambulance driver during the civil war. The marriage broke up after he returned, and Lehmann began a long, unhappy relationship with Cecil Day-Lewis. But at least he came back alive, unlike Clive and Vanessa Bell's son Julian, who was killed while driving an ambulance in the summer of 1937. Another letter in the collection is to Lehmann from Woolf, on the subject of her nephew's death.

"I saw Portia Holman, from the hospital, a few days after Julian's death. She gave me a rather different, perhaps less painful account n I mean less detailed n and I repeated this to Vanessa. She was greatly upset by it, though I think after the first shock it was a relief to her to know how it happened," she wrote.

Like Partridge, Lehmann lived a long life, dying in 1990, aged 89. "In a way, these two women belonged to a generation that could only have existed between the wars," said Patricia McGuire, an archivist at King's College, Cambridge, which has acquired the two collections. "They had education, training and rights but they also had lots of free time and didn't necessarily have to keep a house. They had well-developed points of view and were articulate about their emotions."

- INDEPENDENT

All rights owned or licensed to Independent News & Media Ltd

Advertisement
Advertise with NZME.
Advertisement
Advertise with NZME.
Save

    Share this article

Latest from Lifestyle

Premium
Lifestyle

This kind of sleep is essential for a healthy brain

18 May 06:00 AM
Lifestyle

'Like a cartoon': Author's $65k book prize win nearly derailed by travel chaos

18 May 02:04 AM
Lifestyle

Are six teaspoons of Milo too much? Ardern sparks debate

18 May 02:03 AM

Sponsored: How much is too much?

sponsored
Advertisement
Advertise with NZME.
Recommended for you
Heavy rain, possible thunderstorms forecast for Auckland tonight
New Zealand

Heavy rain, possible thunderstorms forecast for Auckland tonight

18 May 06:03 AM
Three days exploring Cape Town’s outdoor fun
Travel

Three days exploring Cape Town’s outdoor fun

18 May 06:00 AM
Opinion: The kit that fits - The century-old debate about women's sportswear
Opinion

Opinion: The kit that fits - The century-old debate about women's sportswear

18 May 05:50 AM
Watch: 'You've crossed him to the other side' – Kiwi rapper shares moment he sang for dying fan
Entertainment

Watch: 'You've crossed him to the other side' – Kiwi rapper shares moment he sang for dying fan

18 May 05:22 AM
Man fighting for life after assault in South Auckland
New Zealand

Man fighting for life after assault in South Auckland

18 May 05:16 AM

Latest from Lifestyle

Premium
This kind of sleep is essential for a healthy brain

This kind of sleep is essential for a healthy brain

18 May 06:00 AM

New York Times: Poor sleep, especially deep and REM, may raise your dementia risk.

'Like a cartoon': Author's $65k book prize win nearly derailed by travel chaos

'Like a cartoon': Author's $65k book prize win nearly derailed by travel chaos

18 May 02:04 AM
Are six teaspoons of Milo too much? Ardern sparks debate

Are six teaspoons of Milo too much? Ardern sparks debate

18 May 02:03 AM
How to make a family-friendly tomato relish

How to make a family-friendly tomato relish

18 May 01:00 AM
Sponsored: Cosy up to colour all year
sponsored

Sponsored: Cosy up to colour all year

NZ Herald
  • About NZ Herald
  • Meet the journalists
  • Newsletters
  • Classifieds
  • Help & support
  • Contact us
  • House rules
  • Privacy Policy
  • Terms of use
  • Competition terms & conditions
  • Our use of AI
Subscriber Services
  • NZ Herald e-editions
  • Daily puzzles & quizzes
  • Manage your digital subscription
  • Manage your print subscription
  • Subscribe to the NZ Herald newspaper
  • Subscribe to Herald Premium
  • Gift a subscription
  • Subscriber FAQs
  • Subscription terms & conditions
  • Promotions and subscriber benefits
NZME Network
  • The New Zealand Herald
  • The Northland Age
  • The Northern Advocate
  • Waikato Herald
  • Bay of Plenty Times
  • Rotorua Daily Post
  • Hawke's Bay Today
  • Whanganui Chronicle
  • Viva
  • NZ Listener
  • What the Actual
  • Newstalk ZB
  • BusinessDesk
  • OneRoof
  • Driven CarGuide
  • iHeart Radio
  • Restaurant Hub
NZME
  • About NZME
  • NZME careers
  • Advertise with NZME
  • Digital self-service advertising
  • Book your classified ad
  • Photo sales
  • NZME Events
  • © Copyright 2025 NZME Publishing Limited
All Access. All in one subscription. From $2 per week
Subscribe now

All Access Weekly

From $2 per week
Pay just
$15.75
$2
per week ongoing
Subscribe now
BEST VALUE

All Access Annual

Pay just
$449
$49
per year ongoing
Subscribe now
Learn more
30
TOP
search by queryly Advanced Search