Frances Partridge knew well most of the leading members of the Bloomsbury group. Hanging On contains many of her memories of them. It also contains, among her reflections on her own life, her private thoughts on the complex relations between herself, Dora Carrington, Lytton Strachey and her beloved husband Ralph. It is with the death of Ralph in 1960 that this book opens. But even in the depths of morbidity Frances Partridge never loses her knowledge of the fecundity of life, her sense of fun, her eye for absurdity, or her capacity and hunger for beauty, that much-derided Bloomsbury characteristic.