Frances Partridge (Frances Catherine Partridge) Biography

British diarist and translator, born in Bloomsbury, London, educated at Bedales School and Newnham College, Cambridge, after which she worked in a bookshop from 1921 to 1928. Having become well acquainted with Lytton Strachey and other members of the Bloomsbury Group, in 1933 she married Ralph Partridge, whose ménage à trois with Strachey and Dora Carrington had ended with the deaths of both in the preceding year. With her husband, she assisted in the completion of Strachey's unfinished work, The Greville Memoirs (edited by L. Strachey and R. Fulford, 8 volumes, 1938), and subsequently began her career as a translator of French and Spanish literature. Her autobiographical account of the 1920s and 1930s in Love in Bloomsbury: Memories (1981) is supplemented by her photographic memoir in A Bloomsbury Album (1987). She began publishing her diaries in 1978 with A Pacifist's War (1978), continuing to cover the years 1945 to 1970 with Everything to Lose (1987), Hanging On (1990), Other People (1993), and Good Company (1994). Apart from their acknowledged value as contributions to social and cultural history, the works form a vivid testimony to the author's buoyancy of spirit and her faith in the sustaining ethos of friendship. Her other publications include A Portrait of Julia Strachey (with Julia Strachey, 1983).