Thousands of Secrets New Letters of Dora Carrington

Since the publication of Michael Holroyd's biography of Lytton Strachey and David Garnett's first selection of her letters, Dora Carrington has become something of a cult figure. She wrote that Lytton "flavoured all life" for her, but she herself flavoured the lives of her many friends, who responded to her complex, intriguing character with delight and exasperation.;Jonathan Gathorne Hardy described Carrington as "a letter writer of genius". Peppered with delightful sketches, her letters are witty, warm, revealing and perceptive - full of gossip, vivid description, detailed accounts of her emotional life, her reading, her extraordinary dreams, and sharp glimpses of the often slightly absurd world of Bloomsbury, seen through the eyes of someone who never quite fitted into it. Like Katherine Mansfield, she tended to adopt a separate persona for each correspondent, revealing (or concealing) different aspects of herself, so that the reader's impression of her constantly shifts.;This selection is composed almost entirely of letters never before published. It preserves the odd spellings, malapropisms and idiosyncracies of expression which add so much to their charm. Together they help to convey what Julia Strachey described as Carrington's "immense richness and range of feeling" and "the remarkable impression of sunlight she made".