Bloomsbury Lives

Abstract

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.