Dorothy Bussy
Encyclopedia
England
England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...
novelist and translator.
Family background and childhood
Dorothy Bussy was a member of the StracheyStrachey
-Strachey family of Sutton Court, Somerset:*John Strachey , friend of John Locke**John Strachey , British geologist, son of the above...
family, one of ten children of Jane Strachey and the great British Empire
British Empire
The British Empire comprised the dominions, colonies, protectorates, mandates and other territories ruled or administered by the United Kingdom. It originated with the overseas colonies and trading posts established by England in the late 16th and early 17th centuries. At its height, it was the...
soldier and administrator Lt-Gen Sir Richard Strachey
Richard Strachey
Lieutenant-General Sir Richard Strachey, GCSI, FRS , British soldier and Indian administrator, third son of Edward Strachey and grandson of Sir Henry Strachey, 1st Baronet was born on 24 July 1817, at Sutton Court, Stowey, Somerset...
. Writer and critic Lytton Strachey
Lytton Strachey
Giles Lytton Strachey was a British writer and critic. He is best known for establishing a new form of biography in which psychological insight and sympathy are combined with irreverence and wit...
and the first English translator of Freud, James Strachey
James Strachey
James Beaumont Strachey was a British psychoanalyst, and, with his wife Alix, a translator of Sigmund Freud into English...
, were her brothers. She was educated at the Marie Souvestre
Marie Souvestre
Marie Souvestre was a feminist educator who sought to develop independent minds in young women.-Biography:Souvestre was born on April 28, 1830, in Brest, France, the daughter of French novelist Émile Souvestre....
(1830–1905) girls' school at Les Ruches, Fontainebleau
Fontainebleau
Fontainebleau is a commune in the metropolitan area of Paris, France. It is located south-southeast of the centre of Paris. Fontainebleau is a sub-prefecture of the Seine-et-Marne department, and it is the seat of the arrondissement of Fontainebleau...
, France
France
The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...
and later in England
England
England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...
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
Eleanor Roosevelt
Anna Eleanor Roosevelt was the First Lady of the United States from 1933 to 1945. She supported the New Deal policies of her husband, distant cousin Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and became an advocate for civil rights. After her husband's death in 1945, Roosevelt continued to be an international...
. 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 BloomsburyBloomsbury Group
The Bloomsbury Group or Bloomsbury Set was a group of writers, intellectuals, philosophers and artists who held informal discussions in Bloomsbury throughout the 20th century. This English collective of friends and relatives lived, worked or studied near Bloomsbury in London during the first half...
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
Lady Ottoline Morrell
The Lady Ottoline Violet Anne Morrell was an English aristocrat and society hostess. Her patronage was influential in artistic and intellectual circles, where she befriended writers such as Aldous Huxley, Siegfried Sassoon, T. S. Eliot and D. H...
. She became friends with Charles Mauron
Charles Mauron
Charles Mauron was a French translator of contemporary English authors, including E. M. Forster, and literary critic making use of Psychoanalytic literary criticism. He is noted for his books Aesthetics and Psychology and Des métaphores obsédantes au mythe personnel...
, 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 LeonardLeonard Woolf
Leonard Sidney Woolf was an English political theorist, author, publisher and civil servant, and husband of author Virginia Woolf.-Early life:...
and Virginia Woolf
Virginia Woolf
Adeline Virginia Woolf was an English author, essayist, publisher, and writer of short stories, regarded as one of the foremost modernist literary figures of the twentieth century....
, in which lesbian
Lesbian
Lesbian is a term most widely used in the English language to describe sexual and romantic desire between females. The word may be used as a noun, to refer to women who identify themselves or who are characterized by others as having the primary attribute of female homosexuality, or as an...
loves get entangled in the emotional and sexually-charged atmosphere of erotic pedagogy
Gustav Wyneken
Gustav Wyneken was a German educational reformer, free thinker and charismatic leader. His ideas and practice on education and youth became highly influential but were also controversial.-Early life:He was born to a Christian family, and studied Theology and Philology in Berlin...
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
Colette
Colette was the surname of the French novelist and performer Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette . She is best known for her novel Gigi, upon which Lerner and Loewe based the stage and film musical comedies of the same title.-Early life and marriage:Colette was born to retired military officer Jules-Joseph...
's novel Claudine at School (1900). Bussy's novel was translated into French
French language
French is a Romance language spoken as a first language in France, the Romandy region in Switzerland, Wallonia and Brussels in Belgium, Monaco, the regions of Quebec and Acadia in Canada, and by various communities elsewhere. Second-language speakers of French are distributed throughout many parts...
and appeared in France
France
The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...
with an introduction by Rosamond Lehmann
Rosamond Lehmann
Rosamond Nina Lehmann, CBE , was a British novelist. Her first novel, Dusty Answer , was a succès de scandale; she subsequently became established in the literary world and intimate with members of the Bloomsbury set...
. In 1951, the novel was filmed as Olivia
Olivia (film)
Olivia is a 1951 French film directed by Jacqueline Audry. It is based on the 1950 semi-autobiographical novel by Dorothy Bussy. It has been called a "landmark of lesbian representation".-Plot:...
, with the lesbian elements toned down, in France by Jacqueline Audry
Jacqueline Audry
Jacqueline Audry was a French film director who started making films in post-World War II France and specialised in literary adaptations. She was the first commercially successful woman director of post-war France....
. A BBC
BBC
The British Broadcasting Corporation is a British public service broadcaster. Its headquarters is at Broadcasting House in the City of Westminster, London. It is the largest broadcaster in the world, with about 23,000 staff...
radio dramatisation was broadcast in the 1990s. In 1999, her novel appeared at number 35 on a '100 best lesbian and gay novels' list.
Dorothy Bussy was also a close friend of the French Nobel Prize
Nobel Prize
The Nobel Prizes are annual international awards bestowed by Scandinavian committees in recognition of cultural and scientific advances. The will of the Swedish chemist Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite, established the prizes in 1895...
winning author André Gide
André Gide
André Paul Guillaume Gide was a French author and winner of the Nobel Prize in literature in 1947. Gide's career ranged from its beginnings in the symbolist movement, to the advent of anticolonialism between the two World Wars.Known for his fiction as well as his autobiographical works, 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
British Library
The British Library is the national library of the United Kingdom, and is the world's largest library in terms of total number of items. The library is a major research library, holding over 150 million items from every country in the world, in virtually all known languages and in many formats,...
.
Her daughter was the painter Jane Simone Bussy (1906–1960).