Bombay to Bloomsbury: A Biography of the Strachey Family (review)

Caine's richly textured biography offers a thoughtful portrait of one of the most prominent families of the Victorian and Edwardian eras. Starting with the marriage of Richard and Jane Strachey in 1859, the narrative follows the lives of the Stracheys themselves and the extended families of their ten children who survived into adulthood. Her interdisciplinary approach to writing history weaves together a set of stories that span almost 100 years and chronicle the Strachey family's encounter with a rapidly changing world. This rather sizable fourteen chapter collective biography started as a study of the Strachey women. It grew to include the men of the family as the story began to intersect with the histories of feminism, imperialism, and British intellectual life. The experiences of the Strachey women, however, remain firmly at the center of the narrative.

The story of the Strachey family starts in India. Caine's engagement with postcolonial scholarship in Chapter 1, "An Anglo-Indian Family," demonstrates the centrality of the British Empire to this biography. Continued connections between the colony and imperial metropole influenced both the female and male members of the family, albeit for different reasons. The early Strachey men understood India as a place for career advancement and participation in the larger British imperial project. In this way, they were a reflection of a liberal Victorian idea of empire that understood Britain as engaged in a "civilizing mission." Empire proved more complicated for the later Strachey men, who resisted their father when he pushed them toward a career in the colonial service.

Empire also shaped the lives of some of the Strachey women. In this context, Caine follows scholars such as Burton and Strobel in understanding the Empire as a place of freedom for white women to take positions of authority as representatives of British civilization. ¹ India gave Jane and her daughter, Pippa, the opportunity to hone management skills that they took back to England and utilized in the suffrage campaign.

Subsequent chapters place imperialism in dialogue with the histories of feminism and the British literary establishment. Caine adeptly alternates between the stories of individual members of the Strachey family. Each time that Caine reintroduces a character in a chapter, however, she repeats personal details to remind the reader of his or her importance to the argument. For example, she uses the same quotation to describe the influence of Millicent Fawcett on Ray Strachey in Chapter 11, "A Feminist Family" (317), and in Chapter 13, "A Literary Family" (376).

True to her claim to have written a family history, Caine devotes a good deal of attention to sibling relationships and their extended families. Chapter 8, "Sibling ties," uses methods from sociology and psychology to uncover connections between the Strachey children. A duty to Empire binds together the eldest Strachey children, who came of age during the height of British imperial power. This connection does not continue for the younger Stracheys, however. Rather, the figure of Pippa Strachey provides the glue that binds the family together through her capable sensibility and appealing personality. Sibling relationships in large families, Caine concludes, prove the most effective means of shaping the lives and patterns of each member. Caine demonstrates in Chapter 6, "Modern Marriages," however, that multigenerational bonds also prove significant. Jane's continued pregnancies meant that she and her eldest daughter shared the bond of motherhood in a direct way, creating a closeness between the two that overshadowed Elinor's relationship with her own siblings.

Collective biography provides Caine an opportunity to make a convincing argument about the continuities between Victorian and Edwardian suffragism. This multigenerational approach, popular with early biographies of the feminist movement, demonstrates the different challenges faced by mother and daughter in terms of private commitments and public life. The Strachey women...