Bombay to Bloomsbury

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Barbara Caine. Bombay to Bloomsbury: A Biography of the Strachey Family. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. pp. xvii + 488. Thirty years ago, in his impressionistic group portrait, Bloomsbury: A House of Lions, Leon Edel wrote of the iconoclastic modernist aesthete and biographer Lytton Strachey that, for all his efforts to escape certain social and moral rigidities of his Victorian upbringing, he was, after all, “rooted in a family.” This was, moreover, “quite a wild family.”1 The Victorian and modern Stracheys were indeed a wideranging, intelligent, sometimes wild, and, in some cases, wildly accomplished bunch. Their ranks included Sir Richard Strachey, patriarch of the family from the mid-nineteenth century into the Edwardian age, who was a noted scientist and imperial administrator in India for forty years, and his wife Jane Maria (Grant) Strachey, descendant of a noted Scottish clan, who was vitally active in late-Victorian feminism. Their ten surviving children, an equal number of boys and girls, included Lytton; James, the psychoanalyst and translator of Freud; Pernel, who served Newnham College for many decades with distinction and invited Virginia Woolf to give the lectures there that were later published as A Room of One’s Own; Dorothea, who married the painter Simon Bussy and was friend to and translator of André Gide; Oliver, who held important administrative and codebreaking positions in British intelligence for several decades; Pippa (Philippa), who, among other accomplishments, held the family together as it aged into the twentieth century, while remaining devoted to the cause of women’s suffrage; and Marjorie, who enjoyed dancing at Bloomsbury parties attired only in a medallion. It is worth remembering, with Charles Richard Sanders, the family’s first biographer, that the Stracheys “were both individuals 1

Leon Edel, Bloomsbury: A House of Lions (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott & Co., 1979), 36, 68. Todd Avery, review of Bombay to Bloomsbury: A Biography of the Strachey Family, by Barbara Caine, Journal of Historical Biography 6 (Autumn 2009): 73-78, www.ufv.ca/jhb. © Journal of Historical Biography 2009. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons 3.0 License.

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and members of a family.”2 Barbara Caine, in a notable omission, does not cite Sanders’s 1953 study, The Strachey Family, 1588-1932: Their Writings and Literary Associations. This is a significant lapse. One might reasonably expect at least a gesture of acknowledgement in Sanders’s direction, given his important contributions to Strachey scholarship, which include a major book-length study of Lytton Strachey in 1957 in addition to the family biography. Moreover, the driving impulse of Sanders’s book, if not the attitude—he was a hagiographer; she is a social and cultural historian—is also evident in Caine’s work. In his opening paragraphs, Sanders distinguished between mere “personality”—the particular characteristics defining an individual—and “humanity,” which “denot[es] the really precious substance.” To write “the history of a noteworthy family,” Sanders argued, “is to study humanity within reasonable limits.”3 Thus, the purpose of his book was “to study humanity as it has displayed itself in the life of a . . . highly interesting family over a period of about three hundred years.”4 The historical scope of Caine’s study is markedly narrower than that of Sanders. However, there is plenty of personality in Bombay to Bloomsbury, and a great deal of humanity, as well. Caine readily accepts the challenge of telling the complex history of the Stracheys over the course of roughly a hundred years, from the 1850s to the mid-twentieth century. She does this without reducing the idea of that family to a neat homogeneity or reproducing the hagiographic tone that pervades Sanders’s book. Instead, she focuses on individuals and family dynamics in relation to broader social and cultural pressures. And she does it with a persistent clarity of focus joined with an admirable and unprecedented meticulousness of research into primary archival sources, many of them—letters, diaries—previously unplumbed. As “a history of the Stracheys,” Bombay to Bloomsbury “link[s] their lives and activities to several of the 2

3 4

Charles Richard Sanders, The Strachey Family, 1588-1932: Their Writings and Literary Associations (Durham: Duke University Press, 1953), 294. Ibid, 3. Ibid, 4.

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central themes of British imperial, cultural, and social history across the period.”(7) In defining her goals as a historian with an abiding interest in the history of British feminism—a cause to which most of the Strachey women and, to a lesser extent, some of the men, contributed—Caine identifies “central themes” for her study. The Stracheys’ “prominence in imperial administration and science in the nineteenth century,” she writes, “or in feminism and women’s education, in the study of biography, and in new approaches to sexuality in the twentieth, links their lives and ideas with broader historical developments.”(7) Caine traces the many intra-familial links that shaped the Stracheys both as individuals and as a corporate entity. The idea of Strachey-ness, so to speak, exerted a powerful and persistent influence over individual Stracheys’ sense of self, both when they were carrying on the family’s imperial, utilitarian, and morally conventional heritage, as in the cases of Richard and Jane Maria, as well as in the cases of most of their older children. This influence was especially significant for Lytton and James, who actively broke from this complex heritage in ways that would have been unthinkable to their elder siblings, let alone to members of their parents’ generation. As Caine writes, “All of the Stracheys . . . took great pride in their name and shared characteristics, and had a pronounced sense of family.”(210) And in one of her later chapters, on the theme of “Continuity and Change,” she points out that “one of the most interesting questions when looking at the Strachey family over two generations centres on the extent to which it is possible to identify in detail the shared familial characteristics and attitudes that David Garnett referred to as the distinctive Strachey ‘atmosphere.’”(327) To illuminate this familysense, this atmosphere, is one of the two purposes of her book. But Caine’s vision is larger, less hermetic than her predecessor’s. As she says, Bombay to Bloomsbury “combines biography and history.”(7) This means that, in addition to offering an extremely detailed collection of more than a dozen core “lives,” tracing each family member’s life through the major stages of life development, Caine also describes those links that connected the individual members of the fam-


ily to larger social and cultural movements which, themselves, reciprocally helped to define the Strachey atmosphere. “There is a question,” she continues, “about the impact of the strong sense of family tradition and of a shared outlook amongst the Stracheys on the desires of some members of the family to espouse new ideas, beliefs, and ways of life.”(327) An important corollary question Caine addresses centres on the extent to which shifting ideological currents during the historical transition from the Victorian into the modern(ist) eras—the development of new ideas, beliefs, and ways of life in British and European culture and society in general—had an impact on the Stracheys’ engagement with family tradition and outlook, their sense of themselves as a family community. In her preface, Caine defines her “original plan” as an “attempt . . . to combine collective biography with a history of attitudes, beliefs, and ideas.”(vii) This she does, and very well, by arranging her study both chronologically and thematically; indeed, the passage of time entwines with the development of thematic issues in a wide, many-stranded braid. She begins, for example, with chapters on the older Stracheys’ official governmental engagements and emotional investments in India—the Bombay of her nicely alliterative but also historically precise sub-title. Backing up her bold but reasonable claim that “it is impossible to overstate the importance of India in the lives of the Stracheys,”(17) Caine provides, in chapters on “An Anglo-Indian Family” and on the “Imperial Marriage” of Richard and Jane Strachey, the fullest account to date of this connection and its influence on the Strachey family atmosphere, as well as of the Stracheys’ long and devoted marriage. The influence of India on the Stracheys’ practical affairs and on their sense of collective identity reached its peak during the mid-Victorian age and declined steadily thereafter. For the older children, some of whom spent significant portions of their early years and adulthoods in India, following in the family’s long tradition of Indian administration, the Raj was inseparable from their own identities, regardless of how successfully or fervently they followed either their father into administration or their mother in the general celebration of Empire. The younger children—

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Lytton and James, especially—had little, if any, interest in India as an opportunity for a career or for self-development. By the time of the high modernist era (to conflate social and cultural history), after a century and a half of active participation in shaping the contours of the British imperial project, the “modern” generation of Stracheys often looked with bemusement on that engagement—though, even for Lytton, who wrote a fellowship dissertation at Cambridge in 1903-1905 in defence of Warren Hastings, a family hero, India for a time exerted a centripetal force on his uncertain identity, grounding his academic work in a longstanding and stabilizing family concern. Succeeding chapters move carefully and chronologically, with a wonderful wealth of detail gleaned from a decade of research into family archives, through the “life stages” of “Childhoods,” “School Days,” “University Life,” and “Modern Marriage” as well as “Single Life,” to “Old Age and Death.” Caine weaves into this general chronological approach several thematically focused chapters, studies of such topics as “Sibling Ties,” “Work, Income, and Changing Career Patterns,” “Gender Transformations and the Question of Sexuality,” “Feminism,” and “A Literary Family.” Caine’s fundamental organizational principle—to summarize each of the Stracheys’ individual (and usually interrelated) participation in, attitudes toward, or contributions to the various discourses indicated by her chapter titles—is neat, and effectively manages an immense mass of source material; in several places, however, it also results in unnecessary repetition. For example, in her chapter on “A Feminist Family,” Caine describes the origins of Ray (Costelloe) Strachey’s book, The Cause: A Short History of the Women’s Movement in Great Britain (1928), her noteworthy contribution to feminism, and quotes from one of Ray Strachey’s letters: “‘Messrs Bell and Co wrote yesterday,’ she told her mother, in February 1924, ‘asking me to undertake for them a History of the Women’s Movement. 100,000 words. I am to go and talk over terms. If they give me ₤150 I’ll do it, boring though it will be.’. . . [T]en days later she reported that the terms were favourable and that she had now begun to be interested in the project.”(316) Two chapters later, in the penultimate one on “Continuity


and Change,” Caine returns to this event, and repeats the same story almost verbatim, with the same quotation.(376) Such repetition suggests one of the difficulties of Caine’s organizational plan: when, in a book this thoroughly grounded in masses of new archival material, an event falls under more than one thematic rubric, treating it in both places leads to some confusion with respect to emphasis. Are we meant to read the event, presented afresh each time, as equally important in both contexts? Does this invite us to read the book as a collection of discrete but interwoven studies, a collection of essays, rather than as a careful march through a family history? There is also some stylistic repetition—“it seems hard to overestimate the importance of sibling relationships amongst the Strachey children,”(85) Caine writes in the chapter on “Strachey Childhoods,” echoing the opening strategy of the first chapter. I raise these questions—as I would point to the scores of typos—because, excellent as this book is, it might be better, if better means “more artistic.” Bombay to Bloomsbury is a superb family history. Would it be unseemly to express the wish that Caine possessed, or perhaps feigned, just slightly more of the ignorance that, in Lytton Strachey’s words, “simplifies and clarifies . . . selects and omits”?5

Todd Avery University of Massachusetts Lowell

5

Lytton Strachey, Eminent Victorians (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 5.