Hanging on

Frances Partridge kept diaries that capture her life among the Bloomsbury circle, whose members she knew at first hand. She outlived nearly all of them and was the group's oldest surviving member when she died in 2004. This volume gathers her private reflections on her own life, along with her candid thoughts on her tangled connections with Dora Carrington, Lytton Strachey and her husband Ralph, whom she loved deeply.

The book begins with Ralph's death in 1960, and grief shapes its opening pages. Even so, Partridge continues to notice the abundance of living things, finds humour in the absurd, and keeps an appetite for beauty, a quality that Bloomsbury is often mocked for valuing.