Frances Partridge, 103; Diarist and Intimate of British Literary Set

Frances Partridge, a diarist and one of the last surviving associates of the unconventional artistic salon that included authors Virginia Woolf and Lytton Strachey, died Feb. 5 in London. No cause of death was reported. She was 103.

Born Frances Marshall, she was, through friendship and marriage, an intimate of the so-called Bloomsbury group.

The literary set, named for the London neighborhood where its members socialized, was renowned for its frank and searching prose and its rejection of Victorian values through an unorthodox approach to sex and aesthetics.

For years, Frances was the companion of Ralph Partridge, who was married to painter Dora Carrington, who loved the homosexual Strachey, who yearned for Ralph Partridge. They all lived together on and off, until Strachey’s death from cancer and Carrington’s resulting suicide in the early 1930s broke one of the more notorious love circles of the early 20th century.

Frances and Ralph Partridge then married and turned their home into a salon for fellow pacifists and literary icons, including E.M. Forster.

Frances Partridge was an observer of the romances, illegitimate births and suicides that formed the backdrop of Bloomsbury life.

As decades passed, she became the last first-hand authority on the group’s mores and traditions.

She was known as a sprightly woman who gave generously of her time and alcohol to the many who came to tap her memory.

She kept private journals and only in the 1970s began a career in autobiography.

Among her books were “A Pacifist’s War,” “Love in Bloomsbury,” “Everything to Lose,” “Hanging On,” “Good Company,” “Other People,” “Life Regained” and “Ups and Downs.”

She also wrote “Julia” (1983), a biography of Julia Strachey, her childhood friend and niece of Lytton Strachey.

In journals and interviews, Partridge described the delight she took in Bloomsbury life, from nude swims to profound conversations.

Partridge, a native Londoner, was the last of six children born to an architect/amateur athlete and a suffragette. She grew up admiring her family’s friends, including Henry James and Arthur Conan Doyle.

She was a graduate of the University of Cambridge, where she studied philosophy, psychology and ethics.

After graduation, she did sales work in a bookstore operated by Francis Birrell and David Garnett. The store was a favorite of Bloomsbury writers, and she became a regular weekend guest at their homes.

At one gathering, she met Ralph Partridge, a World War I hero, former Oxford University oarsman and employee of the Hogarth Press run by Leonard and Virginia Woolf.

Ralph Partridge died in 1960, and their son, Burgo, died three years later after a heart attack.

Devastated, Frances Partridge worked quietly translating books and playing violin in an amateur orchestra until revisiting her journals became the major work of her life.