Bloomsbury’s best-kept secret

Book club choice Lytton Strachey’s sister wrote a sensuous lesbian novel, says Violet Hudson

Dorothy Strachey Bussy is largely unknown today. The sister of Lytton Strachey, and a friend of Virginia Woolf, she lived on the fringes of the Bloomsbury group. But she was never the star of her own life; a school teacher to Eleanor Roosevelt and translator of Andre Gide, she was always an accessory to others’ greatness.

Her autobiographical novel Olivia, written in the early Thirties and published in 1949, sheds some light on the genesis of this martyr complex. It tells the story of the eponymous heroine during a year at a French finishing school just outside Paris. She is 16, and it is the end of the Victorian era.

The school is run by two powerful, charismatic women, Mlle Julie and Mlle Cara. Pupils fall into two camps, devotees of either one or the other. Olivia is in the Mlle Julie faction, a favourite pupil of this glamorous teacher who inspires devotion to the point of servitude. Away from her Wesleyan family, she discovers art, debate and opera and falls in love with Mlle Julie.

The adolescent adoration is entirely chaste, but this is nevertheless a sensuous novel, full of the scent of eau de cologne and the creaminess of bare shoulders. The atmosphere of the school is both languorous and fervent, a “beehive” of jealousies, scheming and infatuation.

“How hard it is to kill hope!” Olivia says. “Time after time, one thinks one has trodden it down, stamped it to death. Time after time, like a noxious insect, it begins to stir again, it shivers back into a faint tremulous life.”

Strachey’s writing is succinct and unpretentious. Her coming-of-age tale is restrained and sinister; her characters shadowy and nebulous, like fog.

Hailed as a pioneering lesbian novel, is resonant for anyone who has enjoyed or suffered a teenage crush.