Dora Carrington's association with Lytton Strachey and his Bloomsbury friends has tended to overshadow her contribution to modern painting. By looking at the art she produced in each period of her life, Hill redresses the balance, revealing Carrington as a significant artist of her time. The official tie-in to the major motion picture, starring Emma Thompson and Jonathan Pryce. 139 illustrations, 24 in color.

Wyndham Lewis portrayed her as a tiny sex therapist, D. H. Lawrence as a frivolous artist's model and, elsewhere, as a gang-raped aesthete, and Aldous Huxley as jargon-speaking ultra-modern girl. Because of her Bohemian lifestyle, connection with the Bloomsbury group, her bobbed hair and outspoken views, painter Dora Carrington seems to symbolize the 'new' woman of the early 20th century. But the reality is more complex than that. While sexuality, infidelity and modernity were undeniably aspects of her personality, they were equally balanced by a loathing of her own femaleness, a devotion for 17 years with one man - albeit the homosexual Lytton Strachey, and respect for many aspects of traditional English life. Here is a vivid and compelling portrait of a remarkable woman -described by Lady Ottoline Morrell as 'a strange wild beast'.

Carrington's beguiling letters take us beyond the Bloomsbury group to discuss sexual mores, how to be an artist, and what it is to be truly oneself. Known only by her surname, Dora Carrington was the star of her year at the Slade School of Fine Art, and was friends with some of the greatest minds of her day, including Virginia Woolf, Rosamund Lehmann and Maynard Keynes. For over a decade she was the companion of homosexual writer Lytton Strachey, and - stricken without him- killed herself when he died in 1932. Though she never achieved the fame her early career promised, in her determination to live life according to her own nature – especially in relation to her work and her fluid attitude to sex, gender and sexuality – she fought battles that remain familiar and urgent today. Now, through her passionate, playful and honest letters, we can encounter the maverick artist and compelling personality afresh and in her own words.

The formative years of five of the most important British artists of the 20th century.

Shortlisted for the PEN Hessell-Tiltman Prize 2022 Longlisted for the William M B Berger Prize for British Art History 2022 Guardian Art Book of the Year 2021 A dazzling, boldly original work that tells the powerful and passionate stories of a group of extraordinary women as glimpsed through their still life paintings What is contained in a still life – and what falls out of the frame? For women artists in the early twentieth century, such as Dora Carrington, Vanessa Bell and Gwen John, this art form was a conduit for their lives, their rebellions, their quietly subversive loves for men and women. But for every artist whom we remember, there are those whose work is almost forgotten. In This Dark Country, Rebecca Birrell conducts a dazzling fusion of group biography and art criticism, exploring, from the celebrated to the overlooked, the structures of intimacy that make – and dismantle – our worlds. 'A brilliant book ... A truly radical aesthetics fit for the twenty-first century at last!' - Thérèse Oulton '[A] wonderful book. I am impressed and fascinated. It is beautifully written' - Celia Paul

This volume is a biography of English artist Dora Carrington (1893-1932). She was known generally simply as "Carrington" and she is remembered in part for her association with members of the Bloomsbury Group, especially the writer Lytton Strachey. Carrington's paintings illustrated her life, and the houses she shared with Strachey. She was an autobiographical painter, choosing as her subjects the people and places around her and distilling her emotions about them into images of "limpid intensity . . . her landscapes especially express a heightened sense of place that seems to well up from the unconscious."