Letters of Dorothy and Janie Bussy

Blog series Untold lives

Author Dominic Newman, Modern Archives and Manuscripts Assistant

‘There is not much to say,’ wrote Janie Bussy to her mother Dorothy, before filling six sides of letter-paper with an account of some days spent with members of the Bloomsbury group at Ham Spray House near Hungerford in Berkshire: ‘the usual nerve-racking weekend’, as she put it.  Though perhaps slightly tangential to the Bloomsbury group, mother and daughter shared the same taste for wit, gossip and acerbic character observation.  ‘Rain fell in torrents while [Dora] Carrington painted my portrait […] Ralph [Strachey] poured out his — “soul” doesn’t seem quite the right word but whatever corresponds to it, to me […]  Raymond [Mortimer] tried to give his disease a chic air by always referring to it in French […]’.

A newly-catalogued collection of correspondence of both Dorothy and Janie (British Library shelfmark Add MS 89783) has much to reveal about the relationship between mother and daughter and about their family relations and friendships.  Dorothy Bussy (1865–1960) was the third of thirteen children of Sir Richard and Lady Jane Strachey.  Of the ten siblings who grew to adulthood, all made names for themselves: Pernel the academic, Pippa the suffragist, Lytton the critic, James the psychoanalyst, and so on.  Dorothy was primed by a French education at ‘Les Ruches’ – an experimental boarding-school at Fontainebleau founded by Marie Souvestre – for her work as a teacher, novelist and literary translator.  In 1903 she appalled even her liberal-minded mother by marrying the impecunious French painter Simon Bussy (1870–1954).  Jane ‘Janie’ Simone (1906–1960) was their only child; she too would become an artist.

The Bussys settled at Roquebrune-Cap-Martin on the Côte d’Azur, where their social circle included numerous literary and academic figures: Roger Martin du Gard, Jacques Heurgon, and Gabriel Hanotaux.  Dorothy’s letters are both personal and professional in nature, and there is reference to various translation projects, such as of her brother Lytton’s book ‘Eminent Victorians’, and of some works of André Gide, with whom she conducted a decades-long and by turns blissful and agonised love-affair.

Dorothy’s principal correspondents are her mother Lady Jane Grant, her cousin Sydney Foster, and also Marie Souvestre, her former headmistress, who had employed Dorothy as a teacher when she refounded ‘Les Ruches’ in Wimbledon, south London, as Allenswood.  Dorothy’s relationship with Souvestre, as passionate as it was intellectual, was to inspire her novel ‘Olivia’ (written by 1933, though not published until 1949).  There is also plenty of incoming fire from the other Strachey siblings.  ‘Darling angel,’ writes Pippa in 1909, ‘This is a frenzied shriek of joy at the prospect of seeing you all in May.  Do, do keep up to it.’

Janie’s correspondence, like Dorothy’s largely in French, is revealing of a lively circle of artistic, literary and political friends: Marguerite Steinlen, Claude Levy, Thea Sternheim and her daughter Dorothea, Julienne ‘Zoum’ Walther, the actress Sita Staub and the tennis-player Ida Bourdet.  Quentin and Julian Bell (sons of Vanessa Bell and nephews of Virginia Woolf) also feature; Julian writes from Wuhan in 1936 in brush and ink on Chinese paper.  A number of these figures were, like Janie, involved in far-left politics during the 1930s – and not only theoretically.  ‘Last night I went to a fascist meeting and behaved very badly indeed’, confessed Quentin Bell in November 1936.  The archive also contains a letter from the Hungarian communist Richard Lengyel (1902–1940) under his alias ‘Raoul Laszlo’, asking André Gide for help when he was seeking asylum in France in around 1939.  Other threads of correspondence maintained into the 1940s bear witness to the turmoil and suffering of the war in France.

For its relatively small size this collection has remarkable breadth, ranging from the Strachey siblings’ Victorian childhood across industrial Staffordshire, various Bloomsbury group haunts in the 1930s, and, across the Channel, Parisian art galleries and the south of France.  Supplementing the existing British Library collections of Strachey papers (Add MS 60631-60655, Add MS 60655-60734 and Add MS 81885-81972), it is likely to be of interest not only to researchers into the Strachey family and the Bloomsbury group, but also the artistic and literary scenes of inter-war France, Victorian education and the political strife of the 1930s.

The correspondence of Dorothy and Janie Bussy (Add MS 89783) is now available for consultation in the Manuscripts Reading Room.

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Reference sources

• Steel, D., 'Souvestre, Marie Claire (1835–1905), headmistress' [login required]. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2025, July 10)
• Steel, D.,  'Bussy [née Strachey], Dorothea [Dorothy] [pseud. Olivia] (1865–1960), translator and author' [login required]. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2024, July 11)
• Tedeschi, Richard (ed.), Selected letters of André Gide and Dorothy Bussy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983)
• Caine, Barbara, Bombay to Bloomsbury: a biography of the Strachey family (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005)
• Loisel, Philippe, ‘Simon Bussy, peintre’, in the Bulletin des Amis d'André Gide, vol. 17, no. 84 (Oct. 1989), pp. 432–443
• ‘Louis Sauvager’, entry in Portrait Sepia, online database of early French photography, retrieved 15 January 2026.