Hotties from History

Hotty from History #27  -Dora de Houghton Carrington (29 March 1893 – 11 March 1932)

• Dora was a talented painter who attended the Slade art school. She started a fashion at the Slade of wearing deeply unfashionable clothes and having pudding bowl haircuts. Despite this aesthetic mishap, she managed to engage in romantic liasions with a number of other painters. Artists Christopher Nevinson and Mark Gertler both fell in love with her, and although she behaved in a provocative manner she refused to choose between them or have a sexual relationship with either of them. A modern translation of this might be that she was an expert tease, for which I salute her.
• She was closely associated with the Bloomsbury group, and painted portraits of many members. She is also reputedly the basis for many characters in the literary legacy of the group, including Minette Darrington in D.H Lawrence’s Women in Love.
• Poor Carrington was doomed to fall in love with the homosexual writer Lytton Strachey. When he made a sexual pass at her, she retaliated by going into his room at night with the intention of cutting off his prized red beard. Instead, he woke up and she became suddenly enamoured of him. It is a well known and terribly sad fact that it is very easy to fall in love with brilliant gay men, only to have to resign to the fact that they could only ever love you as a friend. 
• Dora also had the tendency to fall in love with the same men as Scrachey. How frustrating!! However, it wasn’t all bad. She married one of Scrachey’s lovers, Ralph Partridge, and the three of them lived together in a hot tangle of bohemian limbs. The tortured hotty certainly endured a lot of emotional crap but at least she had access to the loins of two very fine and passionate men.
• She eventually embarked on an intense affair with writer Gerald Brenan. They enjoyed a lot of love making, but it was painful for both of them, particularly Gerald who fell for Dora and was most hurt by her Ménage à trois, and eventually it ended.
• She then fell for one of Scrachey’s ex lovers, Henrietta Bingham, a very striking and wealthy American, with whom she conducted an affair. Later she embarked on an affair with a Parisian model, novelist and former Slade art student Julia Scrachey- who also happened to be Lytton’s niece. It seems Dora thrived on complicated relationships! Both women were total hotties, so, I don’t blame her!
• Eventually, weeks before her thirty ninth birthday, Dora shot herself. Lytton had died of stomach cancer and it would seem that Dora couldn’t bear life without him. How terribly romantic and deeply tragic.
• Carrington was played by Emma Thompson in a film about her life. Emma Thompson is such a special sort of hotty, who is seductive because of her superior talent as well as her prescence on stage and screen, which seems to reflect the unique appeal of Dora.

-Georgia