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.

I Will Take Dowdy Gay British Writers Of The 20th Century for $1000, Alex...

"At a dinner party one should eat wisely but not too well, & talk well but not too wisely."

Although W. Somerset Maugham rarely spoke publicly about his sexuality, he has been embraced as one of the most renowned gay authors of all time. Maugham: "I was a 1/4 normal & 3/4 queer, but I tried to persuade myself it was the other way round. That was my greatest mistake."

Maintaining the habit of writing for several hours each morning, Maugham produced 30 plays, 24 novels, & more than 100 magazine articles. With his cynical wit & straightforward style, he was more popular among masses than the literary set, & he always felt like an outsider to the establishment. Although Maugham's highly acclaimed works – including Of Human Bondage (1915), The Constant Wife (1927), & The Razor's Edge (1944) made him the most famous & wealthiest author of his day, he never received the honor of knighthood.

There are over 50 film & TV adaptations of Maugham's work, even into the new century with The Painted Veil (2006), Being Julia (2004), Up at the Villa (2000). Try 1934's Of Human Bondage with Bette Davis & Rain (1932) with Joan Crawford.

The moment I put down Michael Cunningham’s The Hours, I picked up Mrs. Dalloway to follow the connection, It was the 1st time in decades that I had read any Virginia Woolf, but in my early 20s, I went on a serious Bloomsbury Group jag, reading everything by & about this remarkable group.

The Bloomsbury Group has gone down in history for the many contributions its members made to literature & art. The group's intellectual core was Virginia Stephen, who became Virginia Woolf when she married in 1912. Today she is recognized as one of the great modernist novelists. She & her husband, Leonard, founded Hogarth Press, a publishing house that brought some of the most significant literature of the era into print including T.S. Eliot's The Wasteland.

The group was also interesting because they demonstrated a sexual freedom that was very ahead of their time. Beginning in 1925, Virginia Woolf had a passionate affair with the dashing Vita Sackville-West. In the first flush of romance, Woolf wrote what has become a classic of gay fiction, the experimental fantasy Orlando (1927), which argued that love & passion ignore gender, & that gender itself is fluid.

Others in the Bloomsbury group gravitated to new ways of looking at love. Although Vanessa Stephen married Clive Bell, the great love of her life was Duncan Grant, who was gay & had been sexually involved with her brother Adrian. During World War I, they lived together at a country estate with David "Bunny" Garnett, who was a lover of both.

3 way relationships with a gay twist were common within the Bloomsbury circle. Strachey was gay, but in the early days of Bloomsbury, he proposed marriage to Virginia. In the 1920s, he lived in platonically with painter Dora Carrington. When they both fell in love with the same man, Carrington married the object of their mutual desire, & the 3 set up housekeeping together. The cross dressing Carrington had affairs with women, confiding to a friend that she had "more ecstasy" with female lovers than with men - "& with no shame."

Virginia Woolf was the center, the gravity & the soul of the group, which unraveled after she drowned herself in the spring of 1941.

"I read the book of Job last night, I don't think God comes out well in it."

Woolf, in1882 & Maugham, in 1874, were born on this day- January 25th.