Chris Roulston

In 2020, Penguin Classics reissued Dorothy Strachey’s Olivia (1949), which tells the story of a sixteen-year-old girl from London sent to a French boarding school on the outskirts of Paris, Les Avons, where she falls passionately in love with one of her teachers, Mlle Julie. Olivia is an exceptional narrative in terms of its content, its composition, and its publication history. Strachey (1865-1960) was part of the prominent Strachey family, whose father played a key role in the development of the British Empire in India as a military engineer. Dorothy’s five siblings included Lytton Strachey, author of Eminent Victorians (1918); James Strachey, translator of Freud’s English Standard Edition; Pernel Strachey, who became principal of Newnham College, Cambridge; Pippa Strachey, who became Secretary of the London Society of Women’s Suffrage; and Marjorie Strachey, a writer and French teacher. Dorothy, not to be outdone, became the official English translator of the eminent French author, André Gide.

Dorothy Strachey, the older sister of the biographer and essayist Lytton Strachey, and of the psychoanalyst and translator of Sigmund Freud, James Strachey, published her only novel, Olivia, in 1949, under the pseudonym of “Olivia.” Written in 1933, when Olivia Strachey was 68, and only published when she was 83, Olivia, set in the 1880s, tells the story of a 16-year old girl from London, who is sent to a French “pension,” Les Avons, just outside of Paris. Olivia is immediately enchanted by the school’s international atmosphere, the cultural richness of the school curriculum, and above all by the charismatic Mlle Julie, with whom she falls deeply in love. Over the course of the school year, Olivia’s relationship with Mlle Julie develops in intensity, until the novel’s tragic ending. Olivia’s storyline is loosely based on the year Strachey spent at Les Ruches, a boarding school just outside of Paris, under the direction of the charismatic Marie Souvestre, which makes it tempting to read the text as a form of fictional autobiography. Olivia can also be read as part of the tradition of girls' boarding school narratives in which the narrator is looking backward to a time when she experienced same-sex love in a boarding school setting, as in, for example, Colette's Claudine à l'école (1900) and “Nuit blanche” (1908), Christa Winsloë’s The Child Manuela (1933), and Dorothy Manning’s The Chinese Garden (1962). In “Lesbian Intertextuality,” Elaine Marks describes this mode of lesbian fiction as containing characters “whose existence in a text is due to a prior existence in what it is difficult not to call ‘life.’” To this extent, girls’ boarding school novels addressed to adults tend to draw on their autobiographical roots, journeying between memoir and fiction, and past and present, often through a nostalgic backward gaze that simultaneously gestures towards alternative futures.