Filling in the Bloomsbury puzzle

In March 1923 a large birthday party was held in a studio in Bloomsbury. It is often assumed that the eponymous Group was habitually glum or intense; but there were a lot of parties. The artists were Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant, and the birthday was David Garnett’s 31st. David (known as Bunny) was a handsome, fair-haired fellow of bisexual charm, beloved by Grant, among others. His second novel, Lady into Fox, inspired and illustrated by his wife, Ray, had been a literary sensation the year before.

There was much energetic dancing, and a floorshow was provided by the Russian ballerina Lydia Lopokova, Maynard Keynes’s wife, and by Harriet Bingham, a new friend of Bunny’s, a recent arrival from a very different world. She was an alluring girl from Kentucky, who brought cocktails and a cake decorated with foxes and sang negro spirituals in a husky southern voice. Bunny and Henrietta were to have a brief affair; by coincidence, both are now the subject of biographies.