Born On This Day- March 1st... Lytton Strachey

Like so many lesbians attending small liberal arts colleges in the 1970s, I went through a Bloomsbury group period when I was studying at my university. I read everything by & about this fascinating circle of friends & lovers.

Strachey by Dora Carrington (1916)

It was a 3way relationship in the Victorian era, when nobody imagined people doing such things, especially England. Painter Dora Carrington lusted after writer Lytton Strachey, who lusted after her husband- Ralph Partridge. Strachey was a writer best known for establishing a new form of biography where psychological shrewdness & sympathy were mixed with wickedness & wit.

Strachey found his niche & his lasting friends at Cambridge, the major players of the Bloomsbury Group. It was in this atmosphere that Strachey was brave enough write & speak openly of his homosexuality.

From 1904 to 1914 he did book & theatre reviews for The Spectator magazine, published poetry, & wrote an important scholarly work of literary criticism- Landmarks in French Literature (1912). In WW1, he was a conscientious objector.

His first great success, & most famous achievement- Eminent Victorians (1918), is a collection of 4 short biographies of Victorian heroes. He followed with a biography with the nutty title- Queen Victoria.  With deep drollery, Stachey focused on the human failings of his subjects & the hypocrisy of Victorian morality.

Strachey spoke openly about his homosexuality with his Bloomsbury friends. He had a relationship with John Maynard Keynes, that was not publicly revealed until the late 1960s, in a biography by Michael Holroyd.

Perhaps the most free-thinking of the Bloomsbury Group, Lytton introduced the use of first names among his Cambridge friends & first approached the taboo subject of sex by pointing at a stain on Vanessa Bell’s dress & asking: "Semen?"

Strachey was decidedly homosexual, but his most lasting intimate relationship was with Carrington, who loved him deeply & lived with him from 1917 until his death in 1932. They were often joined by Carrington's husband, Ralph Partridge. Soon after Lytton died of stomach cancer, Carrington committed suicide, unable to bear the thought of life without him.

Strachey was portrayed in the film Carrington (1995) by Jonathan Pryce, who won Best Actor at the Cannes Film Festival for his performance. Check it out, an excellent film.