Going Strong

Frances Partridge

When her previous volume of diaries, UPS AND DOWNS, her seventh, was published in 2001 - she was 100 - it was widely said that she 'has had a new lease of life.' The publication of her eighth and, she insists, her final volume, taking her into her late seventies, shows how apt that remark has proved.
Now recognised as one of the great British diarists of the century, she was the daughter of a progressive mother and architect father whose friends included Henry James and Arthur Conan Doyle. After studying Moral Sciences and English at Cambridge, she worked a London bookshop, where she met Virginia Woolf, the Bells, Roger Fry and Maynard Keynes. She fell in love with Ralph Partridge - at the time married to Dora Carrington. After the death of Lytton Strachey, with whom she was in love, Carrington committed suicide. Ralph and Frances married in 1933. Their postwar friendships included E M Forster, Robert Kee and Duncan Grant. This life of great warmth and friendship was brought to an abrupt end when Ralph died of a heart attack in 1960. Three years later another tragedy struck when their only son, Burgo, died at the age of 28 from a brain haemorrhage. 'I have utterly lost heart: I want no more of this cruel life,' Frances wrote and yet she made a decision 'to live in the present' and 'to get a better seat on my bicycle'. Despite such enormous suffering, she maintained an astonishing appetite for life, whether for her friends, travelling, botany, or music. Her diaries, written without thought of publication, chronicle a remarkable life. Beautifully written, they are full of an infectious enthusiasm and unending curiosity.