Ups and Downs: Diaries 1972-1975 by Frances Partridge

Memoirs of a Bloomsbury survivor

For years after her death, Virginia Woolf's diaries lay silent in the vault of Westminster Bank in Lewes. The same privacy might have veiled Frances Partridge's had she not, in her late seventies, decided to publish her wartime diary as A Pacifist's War. Though she had translated texts, indexed 22 volumes of Freud and, with her husband Ralph Partridge, worked on an edition of Greville's memoirs, she had not written a book of her own. But interest in Bloomsbury was escalating, and her connection with Lytton Strachey's complex household at Ham Spray, in Wiltshire, had emerged in Michael Holroyd's groundbreaking biography of him.

When Frances and Ralph Partridge had fallen in love, he already had a wife in Dora Carrington. She had married him to keep close at hand the person on whom Lytton Strachey – Carrington's real love – had come to depend. Strachey, fearing that the arrival of Frances placed his menage-à-trois under threat, asked to meet her in London – a pivotal interview both in real life and in Christopher Hampton's film Carrington.

From the start, it was evident that Frances Partridge's diary upheld the Bloomsbury habit of analysing her own and others' behaviour. Since then, at intervals, she has gone to the old French wardrobe where she keeps her archives and resurrected more of her past. As she reached her 100th year, failing eyesight began to make revisions difficult. However, as she tells us in a foreword, her publishers helpfully supplied a BIG COPY. The result is a seventh volume, as zestful as the rest in its sharply testing approach to people and life.

Its appeal has become more distinctive with every volume. Partridge is a less brilliant wordsmith than Woolf, and less amusing in her observation of social mores than James Lees-Milne; but her strengths more than outweigh these limitations.

The chief tonic is her intelligent realism. She is quick to spot assumptions of privilege among her wealthy friends. When dining in Cambridge, she is charmed, but not seduced, by Dr Munby, the eminent King's College librarian. "Lots of people love Munby," her entry begins, "and I think he's a good, kind, clever man, rollicking and boozing gently, and genial in a confident Common Room way. But I missed something – what? Astringency, critical bite."

Some readers may quibble at Partridge's limited social range. Admittedly, with the passing of time many of the more significant figures among her friends and acquaintances have disappeared. But there is much enjoyment in the goings-on at Long Crichel, the weekend retreat shared by a group of homosexuals – Raymond Mortimer, Desmond Shawe-Taylor, Eardley Knollys and Patrick Trevor-Roper – who are not always in harmony with each other, nor with Frances. She is a regular guest, despite their resentment of her gender.

Her appreciation of friendship secures her an active social life. And there is the continuing saga of her exacerbating friendship with Julia Strachey, now divorced from the painter Lawrence Gowing and a monument to eccentricity and encroaching despair.

In the background is the constant memory of her late husband and of her son, Burgo, who died at 28 in 1963. A decade after the loss of both, Frances Partridge still finds herself cast down at moments. But because she observes these sombre, painful moods with the same realism as elsewhere, they have a bracing effect both on reader and writer.

"Pecking round, like a hen, for grains of comfort or pleasure," she writes, adding: "Given the right mood... a great deal can be extracted." She is sustained by music, books and talk, and appreciates those who think deeply and constructively. After listening to an elderly conversation about the horrors of modern life, she notes: "A withered dry, lavender-bag exchange, which left me bored and even a little sickened, not so much because of the lack of stimulation, as because of the condescension and smugness and total lack of humility or humanity in it."

Very different is this book, which leaves the reader twice as alert and therefore better prepared for the ups and downs in one's own life.

The reviewer's biography of Gwen Raverat is published by Harvill