For the Partridges, the most difficult period of their lives as Bloomsbury bien pensants was during the Second World War, when in the face of widespread condemnation they refused to abandon their uncompromising pacifism. Chisholm deals brilliantly with this complicated subject. "[For Ralph] as well as Frances," she explains, "the great issue was not how to counter fascism, but how to avoid another war." Cutting a path through the tangle of arguments on both sides, she shows a clear understanding of the painful isolation of the Partridges' position, morally admirable but intellectually indefensible, as it was regarded by their more sympathetic friends.
In 1960, Ralph died suddenly of a heart attack, his death followed three years later by that of Burgo, newly married and father of a baby daughter. In a sense Frances never recovered from their loss, and yet this courageous woman was determined not to be defeated. For the next 40 years she set out to lead life to the full, writing, translating, joining an orchestra and working hard to keep up her many friendships. It was now, with the publication of her diaries, that she became such an object of interest to the "Bloomsbury hounds", as she labelled them, who arrived in increasing numbers to sit at her feet and pump her for her recollections of Lytton, Virginia et al. To her own surprise, Frances came to enjoy the attention and even grew fond of some of the hounds, chief, and most gifted among them Michael Holroyd, as well as the eccentric, endearing Stanley Olson.
Frances Partridge is an outstanding biography, intelligent, sympathetic and beautifully written. Anne Chisholm had a difficult task in that the subject of Bloomsbury has been extensively worked over, not least by Frances herself in her published diaries and memoirs. And yet far from being trapped into producing yet another version of the old story, Anne Chisholm presents us with an arrestingly fresh and different view. Having immersed herself in the vast quantities of material she has found her own perspective, her own clear narrative voice, and by so doing has been able to paint an extraordinarily vivid portrait of her subject. She shows empathy with Frances - most notably in the harrowing passages dealing with the deaths of husband and child - and yet she can be objective, too. She sees the smugness and self-satisfaction, the unconscious snobbery and the occasionally ridiculous side of Bloomsbury high-mindedness. All this without ever losing sight of the sterling worth of her indomitable heroine.
