Mary Hutchinson, née Barnes

Mary Hutchinson, née Barnes (1889–1977), a half-cousin of Lytton Strachey, married St John (‘Jack’ or ‘Hutchie’) Hutchinson – eminent criminal lawyer, connoisseur and collector – in 1910. A prominent Bloomsbury hostess, she was for several years the acknowledged mistress of the art critic Clive Bell, and became a close friend of T. S. and Vivien Eliot. TSE published one of her stories (‘War’) in The Egoist, and she later brought out a book of sketches, Fugitive Pieces (1927). She wrote a brief unpublished memoir of TSE (Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center). See further James Strachey Barnes, ‘My Sister Mary’, chapter 14, in Half a Life (1933), 87–93; David Bradshaw, ‘“Those Extraordinary Parakeets”: Clive Bell and Mary Hutchinson’, The Charleston Magazine: 16 (Autumn/Winter 1997), 5–12; 17 (Spring/Summer 1998), 5–11; and Nancy Hargrove, ‘The Remarkable Relationship of T. S. Eliot and Mary Hutchinson’, Yeats Eliot Review 28: 3–4 (Fall–Winter 2011), 3–15.