The Kinda Sorta Normal Life of Joshua Jones by E.A. Carrington

If you read English literature of the early 20th century you eventually kind of get sucked in to the Bloomsbury group, first by Virginia Woolf, then by Lytton Strachey, they act like a very polite whirlpool which serves you tea and cakes at 4 o'clock. Not the case with Carrington I liked her. This is a competent biography when I have read some biographies I am often relieved to be out of the company of the subject. D H Lawrence caricatured her in Women In Love (she hated Lawrence because of his homophobia) and Aldous Huxley portrayed her as a sex therapist in Chrome Yellow. Her relationship with some of the other Bloomsberries (as she called them) was rather up and down but she was a strong character who could hold her own in most company. Her art is startlingly good and she has been under appreciated as an artist over the years.

The centre of her life was Lytton and everything else was secondary, even though their relationship was not a sexual one. So close was their bond, that when Carrington did marry, her husband moved in with them.Ĭarrington had affairs with men and women this makes her sound promiscuous, but she was not. The love of her life was the eminent writer Lytton Strachey, who was gay.He loved her in return and they kept house together from 1917 until his death in 1932. Her upbringing, which was strict had made her very wary of her sexuality and she had a clear loathing of herself and her femininity much of the time. Carrington's relationship to Bloomsbury was a little ambivalent and she is a complex figure. Carrington (she didn't like to use her first name) was an artist who studied at the Slade.

Very good biography of one of the more tragic figures on the edges of the Bloomsbury set.

The Kinda Sorta Normal Life of Joshua Jones by E.A. Carrington