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

In her meticulous and detailed study of two generations of the Strachey family, Barbara Caine has returned to the model she used with such great effect in Destined To Be Wives: The Sisters of Beatrice Webb (1986). Indeed, even the tables of contents of these two works bear a striking resemblance to one another: "Old Age and Death" is the title of both chapter 10 in the Webb biography and chapter 14 in the Strachey study. While the Stracheys get a chapter of their history devoted to "Modern Marriages," the Webb sisters have instead a chapter on their "Courtship and Marriage." In both these works of collective biography—arguably Caine's most characteristic style—the family history is traced chronologically, from childhood to death, each chapter divided into sections focused principally on one family member. It's a simple, effective strategy for dealing with the tangled webs of family relations, especially where the family is as large and, as Caine makes clear, as diverse as that of the Stracheys.

There is no question that the Strachey family history is not only an interesting one but, as Caine argues, one that can also successfully demonstrate the changing tenor of English life from the high Victorian era to the years following the Second World War. Jane Strachey, the matriarch of the family, died in 1928, but her views and her demeanor, according to Caine, continued to reflect her Victorian sensibility even as many of her children avidly embraced the social, sexual, and career opportunities opening up in the early twentieth century. Her most famous child, Lytton (himself famed as a biographer), carefully kept his homosexuality from his mother and, indeed, from some of his older siblings, while the youngest of the ten children, James, not only practiced as a psychoanalyst but was one of the foremost translators of the works of Sigmund Freud into English. Caine points out that Lytton and James were among the youngest of the Strachey children (Lytton was born in 1880, and James in 1887) and their careers and lives differed greatly from the eldest of the children whose lives reflected far more obviously the Victorian era in which they grew up. Elinor, the oldest, born in 1859, led the most mainstream of the lives of the Strachey clan; she married in her early twenties, giving birth to five children and reigning over a succession of affluent homes, thanks to the success of her lawyer husband, James Rendel. Dorothy, born a mere six years later, not only married late but wed an impoverished French painter of modest social background and maintained her household largely by taking in paying guests, a highly unusual situation for a woman of her upper-middle-class background.

But while Jane (née Grant) and her husband Richard may have epitomized in many respects the respectable haute bourgeoisie of the high Victorian period, much, in fact, sets them apart, and I'm not sure Caine emphasizes sufficiently how far their intellectualism and activism made them part, not of the consumer class that formed the larger segment of the growing bourgeoisie in England at this time, but of the intelligentsia. Inevitably a good portion of the biographies of eminent Victorians (to steal a phrase from Lytton) do focus on this intelligentsia, on the circles of science and art and letters so active in this period. But these literary and scientific circles, fascinating as they are, were always a minority; the greater number of the bourgeoisie in this period were more at home with the novels of Marie Corelli than with the writings of Matthew Arnold. Oliver Strachey (the sixth child, born in 1874), whose stint in India was a period of intense isolation and frustration, complained in his letters home that the English in India were all Corelli fans. His literarily inclined mother, Caine twice tells us, once described the novelist as a "literary scullery maid" (238; 356). Class, I would...