Dora Carrington was born in 1893 in Hereford. At seventeen she enrolled at the Slade School of Fine Art, part of an extraordinary generation of painters including Mark Gertler and Paul and John Nash. She painted her friends, her house, her animals, her furniture and designed jackets for books published by Virginia and Leonard Woolf's Hogarth Press. She was the long-time companion of writer Lytton Strachey, though in 1921 she married Ralph Partridge, who joined her and Lytton in a largely harmonious ménage à trois. In 1932, after the death of Strachey to cancer, she committed suicide, aged thirty-eight.

Anne Chisholm is a biographer and critic who has also worked in journalism and publishing. She has written biographies of Nancy Cunard, which won the Silver PEN Prize for non-fiction, Lord Beaverbrook (with Michael Davie) which was runner up for the Hawthornden Prize, and most recently, of the diarist and Bloomsbury insider Frances Partridge, which was shortlisted for the Marsh biography prize. She is a former Chair and now Vice President of the Royal Society of Literature.