Nino Strachey: Author of Young Bloombsury
Nino Strachey is a relative of Lytton Strachey, one of the founding members – along with local Viriginia Woolf – of the Bloomsbury Group. She is an author and historian and a Trustee of the Strawberry Hill House Collection Trust. Her latest book, Young Bloomsbury, looks at the queer history of the Bloomsbury Group. She talked to Pippa Duncan about their enthralling lives
The Bloomsbury Group
The Bloomsbury Group was a consort of artists, writers, intellectuals and philosophers who came together in the early 20th Century. They included the likes of Virginia Woolf, John Maynard Keynes, Lytton Strachey and EM Forster, who lived and worked around Bloomsbury. Many openly had same sex liaisons within their marriages, but secret to the rest of the world. Virginia, married to Leonard Woolf, had a long relationship with writer and gardener, Vita Sackville West. Lytton lived with both painter Dora Carrington and Ralph Partridge until the latter moved out to marry Frances Marshall. A state of affairs that suited all.
Young Bloomsbury
Nino Strachey’s book, Young Bloomsbury, focuses on those that were inspired by these main characters. They could more openly flaunt their sexuality, push gender boundaries and embrace their queerness through their transgressive lifestyles. People like Eddy Sackville West, Stephen Tomlin and Julia Strachey.
Her research into this younger set began when a box of Strachey papers was found at Knole, the home of the Sackville Wests. The papers had been put together by Strachey’s cousin, John Strachey, who had shared a flat with the flamboyant Eddy Sackville West in the 20s: ‘I was really intrigued by the letters and about the radically inclusive and accepting lives they were leading and also looking at the role the older generation of Bloomsbury –the likes Lytton and Virginia – played for the younger generation who were 20 in the 20s. How they formed what we would today call a ‘family of choice’ – a group of adults, queer friends and allies, who were nurturing relationships with queer young people. What a positive story.’
Virginia Woolf is mostly portrayed as a sad, depressed woman, but Strachey wanted to bring out a perspective that maybe hadn’t been thought about before, a woman who had a ‘nurturing role she played to this group of young men and women she employed at the Hogarth Press’ in Richmond.
But the Young Bloombsurys were still constrained by the ‘norms’ of the day. The ‘Roaring Twenties’ was still a time when being queer was illegal – and would remain so for more than 40 years. Says Strachey: ‘It was an interesting time, because in the 20s you had this group of bright young things who were experimenting with ways of dressing; you had people like Cecil Beaton and Stephen Tennant who were regularly photographed for the press and were on the front pages of magazines, dressed in ways that we would immediately identify as queer or non-binary nowadays, but at that point was deemed as fancy dress, and therefore acceptable. But if that was your ordinary life, then it absolutely would not have been acceptable.’
More than 100 years later, the Bloomsbury Group still hold influence. Says Strachey: ‘I’m constantly intrigued about how it remains current. The fashion journalist, Charlie Porter, has written a book and is curating a show about Bloomsbury and fashion. He arrived at Dalloway Day [after Woolf’s book, Mrs Dalloway], wearing a wonderful little hot-pants suit that he’d run up himself that day! Quietly following Bloomsbury design principles.’
Strawberry Hill House
As if her family weren’t remarkable enough, Strachey is also related to Frances, Countess Waldegrave. The Countess married a member of the Waldegrave family, who sadly sold the entire contents of this gothic mansion in 1842 to pay debts. Nino is part of the Strawberry Hill Collection Trust dedicated to buying back the furniture, paintings and ornaments that adorned the rooms.
‘She was the daughter of a Jewish opera singer. So, again, interesting because she had this Jewish heritage, which at the time could be viewed differently by contemporaries. I’ve always been fascinated by Strawberry and with the idea of returning objects to it. Horace Walpole, who lived there, is another fascinating, queer figure, and an amazing collector of extraordinary things. So, the opportunity to return some of those objects to his Gothic house is wonderful.’
One of these items is Hogarth’s painting of Walpole as a boy, which is the painter’s earliest full-length portrait of a child and is now back on display at the house. ‘Another is Walpole’s Chinese blue and white porcelain goldfish bowl, in which his cat drowned trying to kill the fish!’
Young Bloomsbury, £10.99, John Murray
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Words: Pippa Duncan