IDENTITY STATEMENT
Reference code(s): GB 0106 9/27
Held at: Women's Library
Title: Autograph Letter Collection: Strachey Letters
Date(s): 1865-1958
Level of description: Collection
Extent: 1 volume
Name of creator(s):
CONTEXT
Administrative/Biographical history:
Lady Jane Maria Strachey was born on a ship off the Cape of Good Hope in 1840. Her father was the Anglo-Indian administrator Sir John Grant of Rothiemurchus in Speyside, who would later be Lieutenant Governor of Bengal. Her mother was Henrietta Chichele Plowden. In 1859 she married Richard Strachey, her father's secretary and the person who introduced her to the writings of John Stuart Mill. The couple had 13 children with ten surviving into adulthood: Lytton, Richard, Ralph, Oliver, Giles Lytton, Elinor, Dorothea, Philippa, Joan Pernel and Marjorie. Lady Jane was an early supporter of the campaign for women's suffrage and in Edinburgh in 1866-7 helped gather signatures for a petition to parliament requesting the vote for women. When the Women's Local Government Society was formed in 1886 in order to promote the claims of women to both elect and be elected to local office, Lady Strachey was one of the organisers and in 1909 she became the chairperson of the London branch, liasing between the organisation, candidates and women's suffrage groups. In 1907 she was elected to the executive committee of the National Union of Women's Suffrage. In 1909 she became a member of the editorial board of the 'Englishwoman's Journal' and was elected president of the South Paddington Committee of the London Society for Women's Suffrage. She actively supported the work of her daughter Phillipa in the London Society for Women's Suffrage and that of her daughter-in-law Rachel, or Ray, Strachey. In 1920 the Society of Women Journalists still felt able to offer her the position of vice president, but she declined the offer. She died in 1928. Her children were all to have brilliant yet strikingly different careers. Richard Strachey was born in 1861 became a soldier at a young age. He went on to serve as a colonel in the Rifle Brigade in Burma at the end of the nineteenth century. During the First World War he was first in the War Office and then in the Northern Command. He died in 1935. Dorothea Strachey, later Bussy, the writer who published her most famous work 'Olivia' anonymously in 1948, was born in 1866 and was educated at Les Ruches in Fontainbleau where Marie Souvestre, the daughter of Emile Souvestre, was the head of the school. During the 1880s, Souvestre moved to England to establish a London school at Allenswood in Wimbledon Park where most of the other Strachey daughters were educated. Ralph Strachey was born in 1868 and was soon singled out as a fine mathematician. With this talent, he later became the Chief Engineer of the East Indian Railway. He died in 1923. Oliver was born in 1874 and went on to be educated at Eton and then Oxford. He too served with the East Indian Railway but during the First and Second World War he was notable for his work with the Foreign and War Offices. He was married twice, fist to Ruby Mayer with whom he had one daughter, Julia Frances, and then to Rachel Conn, sister-in-law of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell. She became known as Ray Strachey and was active in the women's movement alongside Philippa Strachey. Joan Pernel was born in 1876, educate at Allenswood and then at Newnham College at Cambridge. She went on to become a lecturer in French at Royal Holloway College from 1900-1905, then at Newnham from 1905 to 1923. From 1910 to 1923 she was Tutor there and from 1917 Director of Studies in Modern Languages. In 1923 she was appointed Principle, a position which she retained until 1941. She died in 1951. Her daughter, Philippa Strachey, known as Pippa, was born in 1872. In 1906 she became a member of the executive committee of the Central Society for Women's Suffrage and the following year she was elected the secretary of the London Society for Women's Suffrage as the Central Society had been renamed. In 1906 she joined the London Society for Women's Suffrage, succeeding Edith Palliser as secretary the following year. During the First World War she was deeply involved in various war works, from being the secretary of the Women's Service Bureau for War Workers to participating as a member of the Committee for the London units of the Scottish Women's Hospital from 1914-1919. This war work began her lasting involvement with the issue of women's employment and she remained the secretary of the Women's Service Bureau after 1918 when it became concerned with helping women thrown out of jobs on the return of men from the Front. She later became the secretary and then honorary secretary of the Women's Employment Federation. In the late 1920s and early 1930s, family problems took up much of her time as she nursed both her mother and her brother Lytton until their deaths. However, all through this time she remained active in the London Society for Women's Service and when it was renamed the Fawcett Society in 1951, she was asked to be its honorary secretary. She died in 1968. Giles Lytton was born in 1880 and became a member of the Bloomsbury set after graduating from Cambridge. He was both a successful critic and author of works such as 'Eminent Victorians' which is recognised as having restructured the biography into the form that would dominate throughout the twentieth century. He died in 1932. His sister, Marjorie Colvile, was born in 1882 and also educated at Allenswood alongside her sisters before attending Somerville College at Oxford. She too became a writer of novels such as 'The Counterfeits' (1927) and joint biographies such as 'Mazzini, Garibaldi & Cavour'. The last of the children was James Beaumont, known in the family as 'Jembeau'. He attended Cambridge and was a member of the group called 'The Apostles' with Rupert Brooks, with whom he enjoyed a close relationship until the poet's death. From 1909 to 1915 he acted as the secretary of St Loe Strachey, his cousin and editor of 'The Spectator', at the same time as contributing articles to that publication. He became a Quaker and did work for the Society of Friends during the First World War. However, he and his wife Alix Sargant Florence both later became psychoanalysts, spending time in Vienna with Freud and translating a number of his works into English for the first time.
CONTENT
Scope and content/abstract:
The collection contains letters between members of the Strachey family and other correspondents. Writers include Philippa Strachey, Ralph Strachey, Richard Strachey, Oliver Strachey, Sir Richard Strachey, Pernel Strachey, James Strachey, Lady Jane Strachey, Dorothy Strachey, Marjorie Strachey, Elinor Rendel, Dorothy Bussy, Roger Fry, Virginia Woolf and Mlle Souvestre.
ACCESS AND USE
Language/scripts of material: English and French
System of arrangement:
Conditions governing access:
The collection is open for consultation. Intending readers are advised to contact The Women's Library in advance of their first visit.
Conditions governing reproduction:
Finding aids:
ARCHIVAL INFORMATION
Archival history:
Immediate source of acquisition:
ALLIED MATERIALS
Existence and location of copies:
The collection has been microfilmed and is available for consultation in the Reading Room in this format.
Related material:
Further papers of the Strachey family are available in a number of repositories. Further letters of Dorothy Bussey are available in the Oriental and India Office Collections at the British Library while her letters to Philippa Strachey are in the Tate Gallery Archive (Reference : TGA 7028.1.1-22). The papers of James Strachey are held by the British Psycho-Analytical Society while his letters to Dora Carrington (1916-1932) are in the British Library Manuscripts Department (Reference : Add MS 65158) and those to Leonard Woolf are in Sussex University Library Special Collections (Reference : SxMs 13/Pt III). The majority of the papers of Jane Maria Strachey are also in the British Library Manuscripts Department (Reference : Add MSS 60631-54) along with extensive family and personal correspondence deposited in the British Library, Oriental and India Office Collections (Reference : MSS Eur F 127). Papers of Joan Pernell comprising her correspondence with Dame Katharine Furse (1934-51) are in the PowerGen Library (Reference : URWICK ARCHIVE). Oliver Strachey's letters to G E Moore are in Cambridge University Library, Department of Manuscripts and University Archives (Reference : add MSS 8330/8S/47). Sir Richard Strachey's notes and notebooks are held in both the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, Library and Archives and in the Natural History Museum while large sections of his other papers are held in the British Library, Manuscript Collections (Reference : Add MSS 60631-54).
DESCRIPTION NOTES
Archivist's note: Described by Liza Giffen, The Women's Library.
Date(s) of descriptions: 09/10/2002