Mary Barnes Hutchinson (29 March 1889 – 17 April 1977) was a British short-story writer, socialite, model and a member of the Bloomsbury Group.
[1] After spending her early childhood in India, she was raised in Florence, Italy by her maternal grandparents, and later attended boarding school in England.
In 1927, influenced by the Group's writers, Hutchinson published a single volume of thirteen articles and six short stories entitled Fugitive Pieces.
[4] Throughout her life, she attracted a group of writers and painters to her house, where she and her husband entertained, among others, Mark Gertler, Edward Kauffer, T. S. Eliot, Aldous Huxley, and Virginia Woolf.
[5] Hermione Lee asserts in her biography of Virginia Woolf that Hutchinson was the "main inspiration for the febrile socialite Jinny in The Waves.
[4] On the other hand, her letters suggest that she maintained a similarly long term relationship from 1922 to 1930 with Aldous Huxley and his wife, Maria, although this was kept secret from the Bloomsbury Group and from Jack Hutchinson.