London — Diarist Frances Partridge, last survivor of the literary Bloomsbury Group's most famous love quadrangle, has died at the age of 103.
She died Thursday in London, her literary agent, Rogers, Coleridge and White Ltd., said Monday. The cause of death was not announced.
Partridge was Frances Marshall when she became one of the youngest of the "Bloomsberries" who gathered around writers Leonard and Virginia Woolf in the 1920s and 1930s.
The group's tangled and scrupulously self-examined lives continue to fascinate readers.
"I have known the most interesting people of my generation, and that to me is a great thing, the success of my lifetime," Partridge told The Sunday Telegraph in 1994.
The intense relationships among such figures as the Woolfs, Virginia's sister Vanessa Bell and her husband Clive, biographer Lytton Strachey, novelist E.M. Forster, painter Duncan Grant and economist John Maynard Keynes have been the subject of many books.
A 1995 film, Carrington, concerned the unusual household young Frances Marshall entered as the lover of Ralph Partridge, who worked for the Woolfs's Hogarth Press.
He was married at the time to painter Dora Carrington, who was in love with Lytton Strachey, a homosexual who was in love with Ralph Partridge — who was, as Frances Partridge said, "hopelessly heterosexual."
All lived together amiably at Ham Spray, Strachey's house in the country, until Carrington had an affair with the writer Gerald Brenan, one of Ralph's best friends.
Frances Marshall and Ralph Partridge moved to London, but did not sever their ties with the household — they took an apartment in the house of Strachey's brother, James.
In 1932, Lytton Strachey died and, a few month later, Carrington shot herself. The gardener found her still alive and called Ralph and Frances, who drove to out to Ham Spray.
In Memories, one of Frances Partridge's volumes of memoirs, she wrote: "We found her propped on rugs on her bedroom floor; the doctor had not dared move her, but she had touched him greatly by asking him to fortify himself with a glass of sherry. Very characteristically, she first told Ralph she longed to die, and then (seeing his agony of mind) that she would do her best to get well. She died that same afternoon."
Ralph and Frances married and went to live at Ham Spray, which Strachey had left to Partridge.
The Partridges had helped Strachey edit the unexpurgated memoirs of Charles Greville, a 19th-century political diarist.
Partridge died in 1960. Their only child, Burgo, died of a heart attack at the age of 28.
Expressing puzzlement about the continuing interest in the Bloomsbury Group, Partridge said in 1994, "I would have thought people would find it rather dull but they still seem fascinated. I supposed because Carrington died for love."
In an obituary published in The Guardian newspaper, Nigel Nicholson said Partridge "was never a scintillating woman. That was not her style.
"She was intelligent and lively, emotionally well-balanced, and she lubricated conversation by her eager attentiveness, her sweetness of manner, her 'niceness' in a competitive world where that very quality was suspect and the word taboo," said Nicholson, himself the son of two Bloomsbury figures — the writer and gardener Vita Sackville-West and diplomat Sir Harold Nicholson.
Frances Marshall, youngest of six children of an architect and a women's suffragist, was born March 15, 1900 in London and educated at the progressive private school Bedales and at Cambridge University.
After graduation she came to London and got a job at a bookshop through her brother-in-law, novelist David Garnett.
Frances Partridge lived in the last decades of her life in an apartment in London's Belgravia, surrounded by books, and pictures painted by Carrington, Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell.
In addition to her memoirs, she had published three volumes of diaries.
"I'm rather afraid of death — who isn't? — and it obviously must be close to me, but I prefer to think of it as sleep, something I love," she said.
