In 1928 Carrington met Bernard Penrose, a sailor and Partridge's best friend. She experienced renewed creativity while she was with "Beakus" and her letters from that period are profusely illustrated. Penrose, however, wanted Carrington to make an exclusive commitment to him, a demand Carrington refused because she could not end her relationship with Strachey. The affair, her last one with a man, ended badly when Carrington became pregnant and had an abortion.

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Strachey became violently ill in November 1931 with what doctors thought was either typhoid fever or ulcerative colitis. He grew worse by the day and Carrington, who suffered from depressive episodes, attempted to asphyxiate herself in the garage at Ham Spray the following month, but was rescued by Partridge.

Strachey, who had been Carrington's companion for seventeen years, died at the age of 52 on January 21, 1932. Carrington's depression increased even as friends tried to keep her occupied. Six weeks after Strachey's death she borrowed a gun from a neighbor to shoot rabbits in the garden. She shot herself on March 11, 1932 and died shortly before her 39th birthday.

Dora Carrington painted the people and places she loved the most during her life. Her paintings include The Mill at Tidmarsh (1918), a Portrait of Jane Maria Grant, Lady Strachey (1920), a Portrait of Annie Stiles (1921), as well as the others mentioned previously.

Carrington's decorative arts projects included fireplace tiles, bookplates, and inn signs such as that for the Black Swan (1917). She also made quilts, marbled papers for bookbinding, discovered a new technique for patterning on leather, and even ventured into filmmaking.

Much of Carrington's creative energy went into decorative treatments for her friends as well as at Tidmarsh and Ham Spray. Her last painting was a trompe l'oeil work on the front of her neighbors Brian and Diana Guinness's house in May 1931.

Carrington lacked confidence in her own work and undervalued it. She was a perfectionist whose work never met her expectations. While some people in her life criticized Carrington for spending too much time illustrating her correspondence, the illustrations were themselves an art form, as became apparent when her letters were published in 1970. The people who denigrated her decorative projects during her lifetime failed to recognize her talent as a designer.

There were no exhibitions of Carrington's work during her lifetime. The first exhibition was held at the Upper Grosvenor Galleries in London in 1970. A second exhibition was held at the Christ Church Picture Gallery, Oxford in 1978. Curated by Noel, Carrington's brother, it was more comprehensive in coverage and included Carrington's paintings, drawings, and decorative works.

Most recently, there was a retrospective of Carrington's work at the Barbican Art Gallery in London during 1995. Despite the posthumous recognition that she has gained, she remains the most neglected serious painter of her generation.

The Bloomsbury circle's open acceptance of erotic license and hostility toward social convention are important elements in the history of homosexuality among the English upper classes in the first half of the twentieth century.

A large number of significant twentieth-century European artists focused on gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender themes, making such concerns crucial to the understanding of twentieth-century European art.

Often overlooked in mainstream publications on the cultural history of salons is that many of the salon hostesses and attendees were lesbian, bisexual, or gay.

Twentieth-century efforts to reform British law and public opinions about homosexuality met with mixed results, but at the beginning of the twenty-first century the United Kingdom has emerged as a leader in recognizing the rights of its glbtq citizens.

The English biographer and essayist Lytton Strachey spoke openly of his homosexuality to his Bloomsbury friends, but his openly gay works were published only after his death.

Passionate friendships with women were essential to the life and work of novelist Virginia Woolf.