Ralph Partridge

[3] His father was the son of a Devon solicitor while, on his mother's side, the Sherring family were clerics and Christian missionaries working in India at Varanasi.

He reached the rank of major by the age of twenty-three, winning a Military Cross and bar[6] and the Croix de Guerre.

[9] An added complication was Dora Carrington's intermittent affair with one of Partridge's best friends, Gerald Brenan.

[10] In 1926, Partridge left Carrington to live with Frances Marshall, whom he had met while she was working at the London bookshop owned by David Garnett and Francis Birrell; at that time Partridge was working for Leonard Woolf and Virginia Woolf at the Hogarth Press.

After Carrington died by suicide in 1932, shortly after Lytton Strachey's death, Ralph and Frances married in 1933.