Olivia was the name of a Strachey sister who had died in infancy and who had prompted some peculiar lines from Lytton Strachey when he was nine: But the book has another, more oblique dedication: one which makes it a defiant declaration against her family as well as a hymn of praise to a particular woman.
Events have been dramatised, but the main features of the story are autobiographical: the school was one she attended the headmistress a woman she knew and admired the home she leaves is recognisably that of the Strachey household.ĭorothy Strachey dedicated Olivia to ‘the beloved memory of V.W.’ – who twenty years earlier had published a study of ambiguous sexuality with an oddly echoing title. It is not difficult to see why Dorothy Strachey chose to publish anonymously. Her account has little of the traditional school-story about it: no pranks, no prefects, no smell of ink the tone is confessional the subject is first love. Brief and fervent, it tells of a year spent by a 16-year-old girl in a French school: a year in which the narrator develops a passionate attachment to one of the headmistresses. Gide was one of these heroes Olivia celebrates another. But while his energy and imagination turned to anatomising his distaste for other people’s admirations, hers were devoted to the creation of new heroes. Dorothy Strachey had some of her brother’s susceptibility to surroundings and dedication to the animating power of personality: charged by Dorothy’s husband to begin a great work, Strachey felt himself too ‘ obsédé par les personnages’ to comply. Olivia is a piece of spirited homage, by a woman both spirited and prone to homage. The story was Olivia the author, anonymous on publication in 1949, was Dorothy Strachey Bussy, Lytton Strachey’s sister.
Rosamond Lehmann had praised it Leonard Woolf wanted to publish it. The manuscript of a short story which she had written and sent to Gide 19 years earlier – ‘Oh how could I be so idiotic?’ – and which Gide had stuffed in his desk drawer, had at last been shown to friends in London.
Used to hearing about Gide’s exploits, she now had, girlishly, ‘a little adventure of my own’ to confess. In February 1948 André Gide received an uncharacteristically triumphant letter from his English translator.
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