Dartington’s Modernist History
Dartington Hall was a social experiment of kaleidoscopic vitality, set up in Devon in 1925 by a hugely wealthy American heiress, Dorothy Elmhirst (née Whitney), and her Yorkshire-born husband, Leonard. It quickly achieved international fame with its progressive school, craft production and wide-ranging artistic endeavours. Dartington was a residential community of students, teachers, farmers, artists and craftsmen committed to revivifying life in the countryside. It was a socio-cultural laboratory, where many of the most brilliant interwar minds lived or visited, testing out their ideas about art, society, spirituality and rural regeneration. This talk will focus on the people behind the early years of the experiment, on their vision for a transformed society, and their experiences trying to turn these dreams into a reality – all illustrated by some of the sumptuous pictures from the Dartington archive.
Dr Anna Neima is a historian and the author of The Utopians: Six Attempts to Build the Perfect Society and Practical Utopia: The Many Lives of Dartington Hall. She is currently a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of Warwick. She lives in London, but her heart remains in Devon.
The Historical Novel Society UK 2024 conference 