Volume 43, Number 1 · January 11, 1996
An Affair to Remember
By Gabriele Annan
Carrington
an exhibition at the Barbican Art Gallery, London
Carrington
a film directed by Christopher Hampton
Rilke was in love with women who loved hopelessly but persistently. They included Héloise, and Mariana Alcoforado, who wrote the famous Lettres portugaises and turned out to be an enclosed nun but a French literary hack. It's a pity Rilke didn't know about Carrington. She fits perfectly into his cherished category. In 1915, at the age of twenty-two, she fell in love with the homosexual writer Lytton Strachey, and the rest of her life was devoted to making him happy. She went so far as to marry Ralph Partridge, a young man whom Strachey loved and who was crazy about her. She did it so that she should never be separated from Strachey, and she never was. She said she was his pen-wiper, and gave him one embroidered 'Use me.'
Review, 2217 words
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