When I lived in Cambridge, some twenty years ago now, I used to visit Kettle’s Yard fairly frequently.  It made a big impression on me.  It’s the former home of Jim Ede who was a curator of the Tate Gallery in the 1920s and 1930s, but who is now best known as a collector and as a friend to artists such as Henry Moore, Ben Nicholson and David Jones. After a period living abroad, mostly in Tangier and the Loire, Ede returned to England in 1956 to look for a home where he could create “a living place where works of art could be enjoyed, inherent to the domestic setting“. He found what he was looking for in Cambridge, a city he knew from his schooldays.  Four slum cottages were bought, knocked together and transformed into a home and into a showcase for the extraordinary collection of artworks he’d acquired from friends and contacts.

It’s not the paintings and sculptures that draw so many visitors to Kettle’s Yard, though its collection of works by the likes of Alfred Wallis and Ben Nicholson is outstanding.  Rather it’s Ede’s unique aesthetic, which he communicated so brilliantly in the book he wrote about the house, A Way of Life, that captivates and makes the place unique and so memorable.  It’s not an easy spirit to summarize, but it seems to me to have nothing to do with the sterile “interior design” that so many people strive for when creating the spaces in which they live.

Ede believed that the organization of a living space, the careful positioning of paintings, furniture, sculpture, and natural materials such as pebbles and driftwood, should speak about the life lived in that space: its purpose and meaning.  He looked to reflect in his surroundings a harmony that he saw as an ideal elsewhere.  It’s that harmony – and the calm, contemplative spirit that comes with it – that delights visitors to Kettle’s Yard and draws them back. Ede bequeathed the house and its contents to the University of Cambridge so that future generations could enjoy the unique space he created and the spirit that infuses it.

Other than Virginia Woolf, I can’t think of a central figure in The Bloomsbury Group who achieved real greatness. Many of those whose lives touched the fringes of the Group, T.S. Eliot, for example, or D.H. Lawrence, or John Maynard Keynes, grew into painters, poets, philosophers, and economists of huge distinction and global reputation, but Bloomsbury’s core members were mostly minor figures.

Yet the Group’s hold on the popular imagination continues to be huge, far greater than the work of its individual members merits.  The likes of Vanessa Bell, Lytton Strachey, Roger Fry, and Vita Sackville West are known by a large audience, but I wonder how many now ever read their books or look at their paintings. To explain the persistent power and appeal of Bloomsbury, you have to look beyond the work and focus on a word that would have meant nothing to Bloomsbury: lifestyle. The group’s contempt for suffocating social mores, its embrace of sexual freedom and equality, and its elevation of artistic effort seem perennially avant-garde, attracting new followers in every generation, regardless of the accomplishments of Bloomsbury’s leaders.

Dora Carrington is for many a standard bearer of the code by which Bloomsbury lived.  She was a minor painter, though she has loyal admirers and her reputation has grown over the years. A handful of her portraits (the best known of which is of Lytton Strachey – see below) can be found in prominent galleries and collections.  Her significance for those who admire her lies in the independence of her spirit and her determination to live on her own terms as both an artist and a woman.

Those qualities shine through this wonderful collection of letters.  Carrington’s life wasn’t a conventionally happy one.  Her work got little recognition beyond Bloomsbury and her love for Strachey, a gay man, brought little real fulfillment for her.  Her suicide at the age of 38, only two months after his death, has come to define her in the eyes of many as a tragic figure.

Anne Chisholm has done an outstanding job editing the letters of this strange, complex, and uncompromising artist.  At their center stands her besotted and passionate commitment to Strachey, but there are also some lovely vignettes of Bloomsbury’s key figures, including Virginia Woolf and Mark Gertler, among others.  This isn’t a book to be read cover-to-cover, but something in which to dip occasionally to remind oneself of the extraordinary ideals of Bloomsbury and the fierce dedication of those who lived by them.