Bloomsbury Lives

The quirks and ironies of life are often the biographer's delight, unless they turn on the chronicler, as Michael Holroyd once realized to his unease. He was appointed the literary executor of the writer John Collis but was away at the time of his death. Holroyd returned to the country and rushed to the writer's Sussex house to discharge his duties, only to find Mrs Collis reverently flinging the last of her husband's correspondence with his first wife into the garden incinerator. Literary bonfires, inaugurated by Samuel Johnson and zealously undertaken by the eminent Victorians – Hardy, Dickens and James all burnt their letters – lead Holroyd to ponder on the 'ethics of biography'. Indeed, he reminds us of D. J. Enright's advice to the potential modern-day victim of the prying, profiteering sifter of the dead: 'Much easier than your works / To sell your quirks / So burn your letters, hers & his – / Better no life at all than this'.¹ Fortunately for us, the Strachey family did not follow this counsel. Sir Richard and Lady Jane as well as the majority of their ten surviving children and their partners were not just inveterate writers but collectors and preservers of family letters. That extraordinary collection – now scattered in various archives such as the Oriental and India Office Collection in the British Library, the Berg collection in the New York Public Library and the Bibliothèque Nationale in France, among others – forms the foundation of Barbara Caine's engrossing and finely tessellated biography. With this book, the family biography has come of age: its dextrous threading of biography and history lets the individual Stracheys breathe and speak while illuminating a hundred years of British cultural life, from mid nineteenth-century colonial Calcutta through early twentieth-century Bloomsbury bohemia to the death of Pippa, the last surviving member, in 1968.

Leonard Woolf thought that the Stracheys were 'much the most remarkable family I have ever known, an extinct phenomenon which has passed away and will never be known again':

In London the family consisted of Sir Richard, Lady Strachey, Dorothy, Pippa, Lytton, Marjorie, James, and Duncan Grant, Lady Strachey's nephew. . . . The level of intelligence in each son and daughter and in the father and mother was incredibly, fantastically high. They were all, like their mother, passionately intellectual, most of them with very quick minds and lively imaginations. All of them, I suspect, except the two eldest, must have been born with pens in their hands and perhaps spectacles on their noses. . . . They were all argumentatively very excitable and they all had in varying degrees what came to be known as the Strachey voice. . . . When six or seven Stracheys became involved in an argument over the dinner table, as almost always happened, the roar and rumble, the shrill shrieks, the bursts of laughter, the sound and fury of excitement were deafening and to an unprepared stranger paralysing.²

Others, as Caine observes, were less overwhelmed, particularly Leonard's wife Virginia. She acknowledged their gifts but nonetheless found them a 'prosaic race', lacking in magnanimity and adventure, incapable of anything really radical: 'never an Omega, a Post Impressionist movement, nor even a country cottage, a Brunswick Square, a printing press'. In some ways, it seemed predictable that Jane Strachey would become terribly grand and conservative as she grew older, that Lytton, the enfant terrible of British biography with such shocking asides as '[General Gordon] was particularly fond of boys', would write a rather tender Queen Victoria, that the suffragist sister Pippa would champion the cause of propertied women, and that the youngest sister Pernel would settle for a donnish life at Newnham College, Cambridge.³ And yet there was something that Woolf found irresistible about the family, the Strachey 'characteristic' that could easily be spotted though never fully agreed upon, something physically spindly and intellectually fierce, 'something tickling & irritating as well as tingling & stimulating'. Thus, at a Bloomsbury party in 1920, Woolf sat at a corner with Jane Strachey who...