Dorothy Bussy

The sons and daughters of Sir Richard Strachey and Lady Strachey. Dorothea is the second from the left.

Dorothy Bussy (née Strachey) (24 July 1865 – 1 May 1960) was an English novelist and translator.

Family background and childhood

Dorothy Bussy was a member of the Strachey family, one of ten children of Jane Strachey and the great British Empire soldier and administrator Lt-Gen Sir Richard Strachey. Writer and critic Lytton Strachey and the first English translator of Freud, James Strachey, were her brothers. She was educated at the Marie Souvestre (1830–1905) girls' school at Les Ruches, Fontainebleau, France and later in England when Souvestre removed the school to the Allenwood Academy there. She was later a teacher with Souvestre, and one of her pupils was Eleanor Roosevelt. Dorothy Bussy and Marie Souvestre were both strong influences on the young Eleanor.

Personal life

In 1903, Dorothy (37) married the French painter Simon Bussy (1870–1954), who knew Matisse, and was on the fringes of the Bloomsbury circle. He was five years younger, and the son of a shoemaker from the Jura town of Dole. Lady Strachey’s liberalism faltered at the sight of him actually cleaning up his plate with pieces of bread. The family drama "shook the regime of Lancaster Gate to its foundations" (Holroyd), and, despite the silent disapprobation of the older Stracheys, Dorothy remained determined to marry him with what her brother Lytton later called "extraordinary courage".

Dorothy was bisexual, which was common in those circles, and was involved in an affair with Lady Ottoline Morrell. She became friends with Charles Mauron, the lover of E.M. Forster.

Writing

Dorothy Bussy anonymously published one novel, Olivia, in 1949, printed by the Hogarth Press, the publishing house founded by Leonard and Virginia Woolf, in which lesbian loves get entangled in the emotional and sexually-charged atmosphere of erotic pedagogy in a girls' school. As well as drawing on her own experiences in the schools of Marie Souvestre, the novel's theme probably owes much to Bussy's viewing of the 1931 German film Mädchen in Uniform, that had been distributed in England before the Second World War. It may also owe something to Colette's novel Claudine at School (1900). Bussy's novel was translated into French and appeared in France with an introduction by Rosamond Lehmann. In 1951, the novel was filmed as Olivia, with the lesbian elements toned down, in France by Jacqueline Audry. A BBC radio dramatisation was broadcast in the 1990s. In 1999, her novel appeared at number 35 on a '100 best lesbian and gay novels' list.^{[citation needed]}

Dorothy Bussy was also a close friend of the French Nobel Prize winning author André Gide, whom she met by chance in the summer of 1918 when she was fifty-two, and with whom she struck up a lively correspondence. She adored him, although he was a married homosexual and thus unavailable to her, and she later translated all his works into English. Their long-distance friendship lasted for over thirty years. Their letters are published in Richard Tedeschi's Selected Letters of Andre Gide and Dorothy Bussy, and there is also a three-volume French edition. The originals are preserved in the British Library.

Her daughter was the painter Jane Simone Bussy (1906–1960).

References

• Michael Holroyd, Lytton Strachey: The New Biography, 1994.

External links

• Review of reprint of Olivia

Persondata
Name	Bussy, Dorothy
Alternative names
Short description
Date of birth	24 July 1865
Place of birth
Date of death	1 May 1960
Place of death