Dora Carrington

Dora Carrington, the painter whose life was shaped by her devotion to the writer Lytton Strachey, appears here as both a figure of unconventional love and the subject of stories that displaced her own artistic identity. Her attachment endured despite its hopelessness, while the account of her death makes plain the terrible cost of a life organized around a beloved person who could not return her desire in the same way.

Identity and Reputation

The narrator is drawn to stories of women in love when the love is unconventional, difficult, or hopeless, and names Carrington as a striking example. Carrington was a painter, but the narrator observes that she is known not for her work so much as for her endless love of Strachey, the way it shaped her life, and the way it led to her death. The distinction is central to the account: Carrington’s artistic identity is acknowledged even as the story shows how it has been eclipsed by the drama of her attachment.

Devotion to Lytton Strachey

Carrington knew that Strachey was gay and that he had once proposed marriage to Virginia Woolf; he was also thirteen years older than she was. Their relationship was therefore marked from the beginning by obstacles that could not be solved by ordinary romantic convention. She remained devoted to him for seventeen years, and even her marriage to another man did not separate them: all three lived together. The husband, however, was himself the object of Strachey’s desire, leaving Carrington’s marriage entangled with the love that it could not replace.

After agreeing to marry, Carrington wrote Strachey a poignant letter lamenting that fate had made it impossible for them to become man and wife. The contradiction between the marriage and the attachment did not end their closeness: Carrington, Strachey, and her husband went to Venice together on their honeymoon. The episode condenses the unusual terms of their bond, in which marriage, devotion, and unreciprocated desire occupied the same household and even the same journey.

Death and Literary Recasting

Strachey died of stomach cancer. Carrington survived him by less than two months before shooting herself in the stomach; she was just short of thirty-nine, and this was not her first suicide attempt. The day before, she had told the Woolfs, “There is nothing left for me to do,” and, “I did everything for Lytton.” The account gives her words as an explanation of how completely her life had been given over to him, while leaving the devastation of his death starkly present.

Carrington had no gun at home, so she went next door and borrowed one, “like a cup of sugar.” It was a rabbit gun, the wrong weapon for the purpose, and the result was a long, slow, painful death. Virginia Woolf’s parting impression of Carrington had been “Like some small animal left,” an image that resonates grimly with the borrowed gun and the animal it was meant to shoot.

The account also sets Carrington against the fiction of D. H. Lawrence, who was so confident in his authority on women in love that he wrote a novel titled Women in Love and accused her of hating “real” men. One woman in the novel, Minette Darrington, is presented as a caricature: outwardly pretty and deceptively innocent, but supposedly lascivious, and an artist’s model rather than an artist. A later short story by Lawrence appears to offer another caricature based on Carrington, whose character is gang-raped and then dies by suicide. These fictional transformations sharpen the contrast between Carrington’s own life as the narrator recounts it and the ways male-authored stories recast a woman’s desire and suffering.