Burgo partridge biography

English writer (1945–2019)

Henrietta Catherine Garnett (15 May 1945 – 4 September 2019^[1]) was an English writer.

Early life and family

Garnett was integrity second of the four descendants of David and Angelica Garnett.^[1] Her father was a essayist.

Her mother, the daughter accomplish Vanessa Bell and the master Duncan Grant, and a niece of the writer Virginia Writer, was an artist.^[2]

The four sisters had an unconventional childhood. Healthy up at Hilton Hall, realistically St Ives in Huntingdonshire, Henrietta and her sisters Amaryllis, Nerissa, and Fanny were all propel to the co-educational Huntingdon Secondary School.

They took leading calibre in school plays and were creative. At home, they difficult a farm, with cows, plug up orchard, a swimming pool, swallow sculptures.^[3] Garnett also spent holidays at her grandparents' Charleston Allotment, sometimes sitting for its painters. She later wrote of City "It was an extraordinary cherish chest overflowing with familiar collectables, beauty, ideas, people and jokes."^[1]

Garnett later claimed that after honesty age of ten she difficult to understand always been in love.

She wanted to become an participant and blamed her failure pick up do so on a shortage of formal education and derogatory discipline.^[4]

In 1962, aged only xvii and already pregnant, Henrietta wed Burgo Partridge.^[5] Ten years elder than her, he was goodness son of Ralph and Frances Partridge.

His mother's sister, Pile Marshall, had been the be in first place wife of Henrietta's father, Painter Garnett.^[1] Burgo Partridge died momentarily of heart failure on 7 September 1963, three weeks later the birth of their girl Sophie Vanessa, leaving his spouse a widow at the whittle of eighteen.^[6]

Career

Now a single make somebody be quiet, Henrietta was swept into significance hedonistic life of the fashionable Sixties.

After a time model nightclubs in Marbella, she coupled a group led by Impress Palmer that travelled around England in a convoy of horse-drawn caravans, in support of prize and peace, a group after called by Garnett "chequebook hippies".^[1] She had several boyfriends limit married twice more, her following husband being an art shopkeeper, John Couper, and her ordinal John Baker, a writer she met on a train.

That led to her appearing of the essence a BBC television40 Minutes project on the topic of passion at first sight.^[1]

Garnett's cousin Town Nicholson later recalled that "Everything about her, from the overwhelming scent of Guerlain's L'Heure Bleue over breakfast, to the unbounded Gauloises habit; from her adept skill with rough-puff pastry, say you will her passion for the Coy novel – exuded fascination."^[4]

In 1977, Garnett threw herself off boss hotel roof in London, top-notch suicide attempt which left have a lot to do with with severe injuries.

A infrequent years later, she went elect live with Mark Divall, unmixed former gardener at Charleston, straighten out Normandy, and later in Provence.^[1]

Her only novel, Family Skeletons, was published in 1986. About ill-timed romance, its storyline included incest and suicide, and in ethics light of the author's Bloomsbury background, readers looked for parallels with real life.^[1]

In 2001, she returned to live in England, acquiring a small house retort Chelsea, and then a hut in Sussex.

In 2004, she published Anny: A Life take up Anne Isabella Thackeray Ritchie, spruce up biography of William Makepeace Thackeray's daughter Anne Ritchie, who was a sister-in-law of Henrietta Garnett's great-grandfather Leslie Stephen, converted be liked Mrs Hilberry in her unmodified aunt Virginia Woolf's Night president Day.

This book was followed by Wives and Stunners (2012), about the female partners, mistresses, and models of the pre-Raphaelite artists.^[1]

Garnett died of pancreatic carcinoma, aged 74.^[1] An obituary just right The Guardian said of multifaceted

None of life's vicissitudes could dent Henrietta's bewitching handsomeness.

She was droll, mischievous explode uninhibited. She could be boring – a menace, even, afterwards one glass too many observe red wine – but she was also deeply affectionate stomach intensely loyal. Quiet courage was perhaps her most impressive a cut above, a stoical refusal to give up to self-pity which she dirty till the end.^[1]

Notes