ABSTRACT
Dora Carrington was born at Hereford, England, on March 29, 1893, in a middle-class family, to Samuel Carrington, a railway builder for the East India Company, who had retired in England with his wife, the far younger Charlotte Houghton, the rheumatic governess to the children of one of his nieces. Her ambitions for herself never included a standard marriage and children model—she retained perhaps in herself too much of the child for that. Having met Lytton Strachey through Virginia and Leonard Woolf, she fell in love with him in rather extraordinary circumstances: on a walk, he was attracted by her boyish figure, and tried to kiss her, whereupon she determined to have her revenge. Tormented for much of her life by nightmares and feelings of drastic insufficiency, Carrington nevertheless succeeded in quite an extraordinary fashion in showing and sharing a unique style of living, thinking, and writing which is—at its best—delightful, and—at its most depressing—profoundly troubling.
