BooksObituaryHenrietta Garnett obituary
Writer and biographer born into a Bloomsbury group family who found an escape from her often turbulent life in her work
Although she was born with ink in her veins – her illustrious literary lineage stretched back several generations on both her paternal and maternal sides – Henrietta Garnett, who has died from pancreatic cancer aged 74, became a writer only in middle age. Among the eminent Victorians in whose world she subsequently immersed herself she found an escape from her own often turbulent existence.
Her first book, and only novel, an engaging if occasionally implausible tale of romantic awakening published in 1986, bore the resonant title Family Skeletons – of which she had enough to fill several cupboards. It was not a roman à clef but, given her Bloomsbury background, some readers inevitably sought biographical clues in its knotty storyline, with its intimations of incest and suicide.
Henrietta was the second of four daughters of the novelist David Garnett – author of Lady Into Fox and Aspects of Love – and his second wife, Angelica. At the time of Angelica’s birth, her father, the artist Duncan Grant, and her future husband were lovers and both living at Charleston, the farmhouse in Sussex that was one of Bloomsbury’s rural outposts, with her mother, the artist Vanessa Bell; Angelica was brought up as the daughter of Vanessa’s husband Clive and did not discover her true parentage until she was 18.
Henrietta’s childhood home was Hilton Hall, a splendid though fearfully cold Jacobean house near Huntingdon, and she went to Huntingdon grammar school (now Hinchingbrooke school), but many holidays were spent at Charleston, where she sat for long, happy hours for its resident painters. Charleston, she wrote, had the most powerful identity of any place she had known: “It was an extraordinary treasure chest overflowing with familiar curiosities, beauty, ideas, people and jokes.”
She was upset when, in an acidic memoir, Deceived With Kindness (1984), Angelica later revealed some of the dirty linen buried at the bottom of the chest. Henrietta became fully aware of her complicated inheritance only on the eve of her own marriage.
That marriage, when she was barely 17, grafted a further branch on to Bloomsbury’s already tangled family tree. Henrietta’s husband was Burgo Partridge, the son of her parents’ friends Ralph and Frances Partridge (Frances was also the sister of David Garnett’s first wife, Ray Marshall), 10 years her senior. A year later their daughter, Sophie, was born. Sophie was four weeks old, asleep in her Moses basket while Henrietta took a bath, when Burgo, in the middle of a telephone conversation with his friend the political journalist Peter Jenkins, dropped dead of an aortic aneurysm.
As a teenage widow, Henrietta cut a figure at once tragic and glamorous. She was soon swept into the carefree, hedonistic whirl of the swinging 60s. For a while she led a nightclub life in Marbella. Later in that decade she joined a band of artistocratic drop-outs led by Mark Palmer – “chequebook hippies”, as she later described them – who drifted around Britain in a cavalcade of horse-drawn Gypsy caravans in search of love and peace.
There followed numerous boyfriends and eventually two more husbands: John Couper, an art dealer, and John Baker, a writer. Henrietta’s initial encounter with the latter, in a train carriage, led to a memorable appearance in a BBC 40 Minutes documentary about love at first sight – although by the time the programme was broadcast the marriage was effectively over.
At times she struggled with her demons and in 1977 she tried to take her own life by throwing herself from the roof of a London hotel, which left her with long-lasting injuries. In the early 80s she settled in France, first in Normandy, then in Provence, with Mark Divall, who had been the gardener at Charleston.
In 2001 Henrietta returned permanently to the UK, to a mews house in Chelsea, London, and latterly also a cottage in Sussex. She had always been fascinated by the 19th-century milieu of Bloomsbury’s forebears.
Anny, her 2004 life of Thackeray’s daughter Anny Ritchie continued a distinguished tradition of family biography: Ritchie was the sister-in-law of Henrietta’s great-grandfather Sir Leslie Stephen and the indomitable “Aunt Anny” immortalised by Virginia Woolf as Mrs Hilberry in her 1919 novel Night and Day. It was also an example of an author and subject perfectly matched, resulting in a wonderfully vivid likeness of her scatty, extravagant and unconventional ancestor.
Her gift for elucidating character through quirky but telling details of dress, thought or behaviour was similarly deployed in Wives and Stunners (2012), her group portrait of the muses, models and mistresses of the pre-Raphaelites – though it was a little over-reliant on secondary sources – and in the pungent memoirs she occasionally wrote of her grandparents and their circle.
None of life’s vicissitudes could dent Henrietta’s bewitching beauty. She was droll, mischievous and uninhibited. She could be exasperating – a menace, even, after one glass too many of red wine – but she was also deeply affectionate and intensely loyal. Quiet courage was perhaps her most impressive quality, a stoical refusal to succumb to self-pity which she maintained till the end.
She is survived by her daughter.
Henrietta Catherine Garnett, writer, born 15 May 1945; died 4 September 2019
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