David Boyd Haycock - A Crisis of Brilliance
© Edgar Astaire
Dora Carrington
Dora Carrington (1893-1932): Dora Carrington grew up in Bedford.
Her father, Samuel, had worked as a railway engineer in India, and on his return
to England he married the governess to the children of one of his nieces. He
was sixty-one when Dora was born – his wife only in her early forties.
Dora doted on her father, but hated her conventional, prudish, middle-class
mother. Her home life sealed her character, and Carrington grew up to be a
complex, secretive woman of confused sexuality, but one who attracted the keen
interest of many of the men (and sometimes the women) that she met. ‘
Arriving at the Slade in 1910 Carrington dropped the Christian name she despised,
cut short her hair, and became a radical, fashion-setting figure. (A sturdy
figure,’ Virginia Woolf wrote of her in 1918, ‘dressed in a print
dress … a thick mop of golden red hair, & a fat decided clever face,
with staring bright blue eyes.’) Paul Nash, Richard Nevinson and Mark
Gertler all fell in love with. Though she won a coveted Slade scholarship,
she remained uncertain of her abilities as an artist, and displayed very little
of her work during her lifetime. Her close but tempestuous relationship with
Gertler ended when she fell in love with the homosexual writer, Lytton Strachey – but
her life followed an unhappy, and ultimately tragic, course.