Open AccessHelen Southworth. Fresca. A Life in the Making. A Biographer’s Quest for a Forgotten Bloomsbury Polymath
Author(s) -
Heleen van Duijn
Publication year - 2020
Publication title -
european journal of life writing
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
ISSN - 2211-243X
DOI - 10.21827/ejlw.9.36978
Subject(s) - biography , painting , polymath , brother , subject (documents) , conformist , choir , art history , art , classics , literature , history , sociology , visual arts , law , politics , library science , anthropology , computer science , political science
The subject of Southworth’s book is Francesca (Fresca) Allinson (1902–1945), a puppeteer, choral conductor, writer and creator of folksongs, whose life was cut short by drowning. She grew up in a gifted and thoroughly non-conformist family. Her brother Adrian, a painter, studied at the Slade school. Her father worked as a doctor at his practice in London, obtaining and practising his own unorthodox convictions about hygiene and diet. As a radical pacifist Fresca helped provide alternative communities for conscientious objectors (COs). Her fictional autobiography A Childhood was published in 1937, by the Hogarth Press, the publishing house of Leonard and Virginia Woolf.