BOMBAY TO BLOOMSBURY: A Biography of the Strachey Family
by Barbara Caine OUP £25 pp488
Photographs of a dancing Marjorie, the youngest of Lytton Strachey’s five sisters, with a scarlet cushion stuffed into the front of her black tights, seem not to have survived. Nor do pictures of James, the youngest of her five brothers, cavorting in transparent harem pants, his torso smothered in black greasepaint. (The occasion was a party James threw to show solidarity with his sisters in their work for women’s suffrage.)
Had such pictures been available, it is not certain that they would have found a place in Barbara Caine’s book. Humour, a quality that is strongly suggested by a family photograph of the Strachey children kneeling behind their parents in the style of a medieval monument, is conspicuously absent from her investigation of their lives. Leonard Woolf is quoted for his recollection of Strachey parties as occasions full of the rumble and laughter of family debate; the rumble, not the laughter, comes across in Caine’s descriptions of rifts and feuds and snobberies. Only when she writes of Pippa, the family angel, adored by all, does she make the reader regret that Richard Strachey’s descendants have virtually disappeared from sight.
Pippa died, unmarried, in 1968; of the five younger Stracheys who predeceased her, only one had children. This is a startling statistic in a family of 10. If you add the fact that Frances Partridge, visiting James and his wife after the death of her only child, found her old friends unable even to mention the tragedy, you begin to sense something quite strange in the Strachey family make-up. There is a wonderful subject here, to which Caine and her editors (OUP should hang its head in shame for such sloppy proofreading) have done insufficient justice.
Caine, an authority on feminism, makes no secret of the fact that it is the women in the Strachey family who interest her most. The daughters were bright, strong-willed and independent. The mother, who had her first child when she was 19, was well read, forward-looking and stoical in adversity. She needed to be. Her husband, Richard Strachey, and his brothers lost all they had when an Indian bank went bust in the 1860s; good servants of the Empire that they were, they buckled their belts tighter and went back to work. Richard commuted from India; Jane oversaw their growing brood in London.
Neither of the older Stracheys get high awards as parents. Dick, their oldest son, lived as far away from the family as he could get; Dorothy’s engagement to a French artist was greeted with astonished displeasure (Simon Bussy was a social class below them). Delicate, neurotic Lytton, his mother’s favourite for a time, was sent away to a school designed to breed soldiers and empire builders; Marjorie was abandoned or ignored. An argument might be made that the fierce intelligence of the Strachey daughters was a reaction against an old-fashioned mother who loved meeting aristocrats and became absurdly stately when she finally got a title of her own.
Certainly, the girls shone. Lytton, when Eminent Victorians is taken from his crown, wrote little to upset his reactionary parents. Nominally supportive of the Strachey women’s feminism, he still expected them to behave like a harem of nursemaids. When Dorothy translated one of her friend André Gide’s most important novels and asked Lytton to look at it, he couldn’t be bothered. As she pragmatically observed, Lytton didn’t tolerate boredom.
The daughters, on the other hand, were generous with their gifts. Dorothy became Gide’s foremost translator and wrote Olivia, a remarkable anonymous novel about schoolgirl love. Pernel, as principal of Newnham College, improved the quality of female education, if not the meals (A Room of One’s Own pokes fun at Pernel’s splendid indifference to college fare). Pippa, working hand in hand with her devoted sister-in-law, Ray Costelloe, campaigned for equal pay for women while acting as Roger Fry’s mentor and recorder. Even Marjorie, praised by Virginia Woolf for her eccentric parties and her “talent for obscenity”, tried her hand at novels, parodying Virginia as Volumnia Fox in a fairly typical 1920s spoof that Caine is quick to dismiss.
Marjorie was no Evelyn Waugh and The Counterfeits was one of many feeble forerunners to Vile Bodies. Still, it’s hard to escape the feeling of censoriousness that runs through Caine’s book. Marjorie’s blithe indifference to the Woman Question earns her a black mark; we hear a good deal about Lytton’s dependence on female care and almost nothing about his erudition, his wit and, as his biographer Michael Holroyd unforgettably showed, his vulnerability. Turning the pages of this sturdy, unrelenting book with increasing impatience to reach the chapter titled Old Age and Death, I found myself longing for Holroyd’s lighter touch, his easy empathy.
But this is a sterling work, the product of 10 years’ meticulous research. It cannot be dismissed. Carefully structured to present us with the same material in mildly varied forms, like painting in sepia tints, it achieves something of great value. By putting the younger, best-known Stracheys into the context of their family, by showing the long and duty-driven commitment to Empire, Caine makes us understand why Lytton found it impossible to be caustic about Queen Victoria in his biography. His friends were embarrassed by his respectful stance; his mother,who had told him it was not the poor queen’s fault that she was a little stupid, understood that Lytton was writing as one of Empire’s sons, as a Strachey should.
ONLY CONNECT
Through Lytton, the Strachey children moved in exalted literary circles. Virginia Woolf knew them well, as did Frances Partridge, above right, who subsequently witnessed the children’s sad decline, including Pippa’s blindness, Dorothy’s dementia and the tragic death by gas of Dorothy’s daughter Janie.
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