Dorothy and Janie Bussy | Correspondence of the Strachey family, Bloomsbury Group, and other writers and artists, 1880s-1960

Bussy family Correspondence.

An archive of about 290 letters to Dorothy Bussy (née Strachey, 1865-1960), her daughter, Jane Simone Bussy (1906-1960), and also her husband Simon Bussy (1870-1954), including: c.12 letters between Dorothy and Simon; c.33 letters to Dorothy by her mother Jane, Lady Strachey (late 1880s to c.1903); c.32 letters by other members of the remarkable Strachey family; letters by other figures associated with the Bloomsbury Group, including c.10 by Quentin and Julian Bell; letters by other notable figures such as the writers André Maurois, Enid Starkie, Natalie C Barney, Louis Gillet, and Lucy Violet Holdsworth, the imposter Harry Domela (“Victor Zsajka”), and the educator Marie Souvestre (series); in English and French, some with envelopes, also with a small group of photographs and postcards; c.1880s to c.1960

Dorothy Bussy was a novelist and translator, best known for Olivia, her novel about a schoolgirl’s desire for her teacher, Mlle Julie – a novel widely considered to have been based on her own education at Les Ruches in Fontainebleau under the inspirational educator Marie Souvestre (Bussy later taught at Souvestre’s school in Wimbledon and letters by Souvestre are found in the current archive). Like many of her circle, Dorothy was open to romantic entanglements with men and women (including a cousin, Sydney Foster, some of whose letters are included here, and Ottoline Morrell ), but in 1903 she married the French artist Simon Bussy, a friend of Matisse and many of the members of the Bloomsbury Group. She and her husband thereafter split their time between Bloomsbury and the south of France. In later years she had a passionate friendship with Andre Gidé that lasted for thirty years (Gide’s letters to her are now in the BNF) and there are many references to Gide in the current correspondence, from the Irish critic Enid Starkie asking for Dorothy’s help when writing a short book on Gide’s work, to Martin Secker on the publication of a new translation, to the presence in the correspondence of a letter by the Hungarian communist Raoul Laszlo (real name Richard Lengyel) to Gide himself.

The remarkable lives of the wider Strachey family are a major theme in the correspondence. Her mother Jane, Lady Strachey, was a leading advocate of Women’s Suffrage and an author; Lytton Strachey was her brother; one sister, Pippa, was secretary of the NUWSS (Britain’s leading suffragist organisation), and other, Pernel, was a scholar who became Principal of Newnham College, Cambridge. All of these figures, with the exception of Lytton, are well represented in the current archive. For example, Pippa writes from Durbins in Guildford (the home of Roger Fry) in May 1916 about her experience selling family books at Sotheby’s (“…The whole affair was very curious & interesting to watch though agonising; the technique of the selling seemed supremely good Lytton & I thought…”), reassuring her sister that she had got the advice of Robbie Ross (the critic and dealer best known as Oscar Wilde’s literary executor) that “Sotheby’s is absolutely honest & respectable in all its dealings”.

Jane (“Janie”) Simone Bussy, Dorothy and Simon’s only child, was also an artist. As a young woman in the 1930s she became active in left-wing politics. There is a highly entertaining series of letters by Quentin Bell – a fellow artist of second-generation Bloomsbury – on his efforts to support the Communist Party, which he evidently found impossible to take as seriously as Janie wished, as well as a remarkable long letter by his brother Julian writing from the University of Wuhan in 1936 on his personal and political concerns. Other political letters from the 1930s include several by François Walter of the Comité de vigilance des intellectuels antifascists. Many of the other letters to Janie in the current archive relate to her work as an artist from the 1930s to her sudden death in 1960. 

THIS GROUP OF NEARLY 300 LETTERS PROVIDES A UNIQUE INSIGHT INTO A TIGHTLY-KNIT AND HIGHLY INFLUENTIAL GROUP OF FREE-THINKING INTELLECTUALS, WRITERS AND ARTISTS IN THE FIRST HALF OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY.