No Shame Afterwards

Carrington's Life Within and Beyond Biographic Tradition

Abstract

In the Bloomsbury group, a circle largely remembered for its fluid understanding of sexuality and experimentations with nonmonogamy, Dora Carrington is not often the first character to come to mind. Yet her life is full of queer phenomena, and her art is resemblant of her uniquely unconventional life, one where she had romantic and sexual relationships with women, was in a lifelong companionship with a gay man, and expressed what may have been the inklings of a non-binary identity.

This essay reexamines the tradition of biographic work on Dora Carrington, first by noting findings which have not been previously referenced in much capacity (if at all), and secondly by critically analyzing the biographical sources that exist of Carrington and noting how they are at odds with her lived experience as rendered in her first-person ego documents which she left behind. The biographical review section reveals that Carrington’s experience sexuality has been modified from the account which appears, both explicitly and implicitly, in her correspondence and journals, in order to fit a narrative of prevailing heterosexuality. It is necessary to find the throughline of both the flourishing of sexual and romantic queer relationships as well as understanding the heterosexism under which they operated, as well as exploring the culture and/or meaning of silence in work on Carrington: what has not been said may end up being the most important of all.