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Strachey and Carrington first met during the First World War. She fell in love with him, despite his sexuality, and the pair lived together at Tidmarsh Mill in Berkshire. Carrington’s unrequited love for Strachey was mirrored by his for Ralph Partridge, whom he had met in 1918. Partridge instead married Carrington, who had accepted the impossibility of marrying Strachey, in 1921. Strachey consented to the marriage despite finding it personally heartbreaking, and allowed the pair to live with him in his Wiltshire farm house, Ham Spray, which he bought in 1924. There, Partridge had intended to establish a publishing house with Strachey, the Tidmarsh Press, named after Strachey’s Berkshire home, but turned to bookbinding instead, making handmade bindings for many of the books in the Ham Spray library. He developed a reputation for the craft within the Bloomsbury Group, with Virginia Woolf once asking him to “send me a list of your terms for binding books. I want some done” ( Letters , vol. III, p. 192). Carrington, meanwhile, was known to have made patterned paper for Partridge’s bindings. This was just one of her crafts: “she painted tiles and tea sets, made patchwork quilts, each one a calendar of her life; marbled papers for bookbinding; discovered a new technique for patterning on leather; printed bookplates from woodblocks and provided illustrations for five books” (Gaze, p. 234). As well as the paper used to bind this copy, Carrington also designed Strachey’s decorative bookplate. It is evidently a book that meant much to Strachey, who was captivated by La Rochefoucauld’s writing, particularly his Maximes . He has annotated his copy throughout, with several corrections and underlinings, and added a two-line bibliographic note to the preface. Strachey included La Rochefoucauld in his Landmarks in French Literature (1912), writing that he “was the first French writer to understand completely the wonderful capacities for epigrammatic statement which his language possessed; and in the dexterous precision of pointed phrase no succeeding author has ever surpassed him. His little book of Maxims consists of about five hundred detached sentences, polished like jewels, and, like jewels, sparkling with an inner brilliance on which it seems impossible that one can gaze too long” (Strachey, p. 122).
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After Strachey died in 1932, Carrington took her own life, and Ralph Partridge inherited Ham Spray. The following year he married Frances Marshall, whom he had met while working at the Hogarth Press, where the pair worked together on an unexpurgated edition of the Greville diaries under Strachey’s editorship. Frances moved in with him at the house, and began cataloguing the library there: a pencilled shelf mark (“Lib.C.7”) to the front pastedown of the present volume is very likely in Frances’s hand. The book subsequently passed to Strachey’s last lover, the publisher Roger Senhouse. The two had first met in 1924, and their affair lasted from 1925 until just before Strachey’s death in 1932 when, as Strachey’s biographer Michael Holroyd notes, “the books in Lytton’s library dated before 1841 were left to Senhouse” (Holroyd, p. 776). This would seem to include the present volume, the contents of which had first been printed in 1664. Senhouse later gave the book as a Christmas present to John Pattison, inscribing the front pastedown: “John Pattison from Roger Senhouse. Christmas 1940 a token of friendship in a troubled year”. The book was later in the collection of comedian and collector Barry Humphries, with his bookplate. Octavo (239 × 152 cm). Bound by Ralph Partridge in parchment-backed patterned paper boards by Ralph Partridge, spine hand-lettered in black ink, plain endpapers, top edge gilt, others untrimmed. Spine somewhat darkened, couple of touches of finger-soiling to parchment, binding otherwise bright, edges lightly rubbed and tips slightly worn, contents clean. A very good copy. ¶ Delia Gaze, Concise Dictionary of Women Artists , 2013; Michael Holroyd, Lytton Strachey: The New Biography , 2015; Lytton Strachey, Landmarks in French Literature , 1912; Virginia Woolf, Letters , 6 Vols,
1975–80. £3,000
[158256]
All items are fully described and photographed at peterharrington.co.uk
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