#Dorothy Strachey

[mdemn]

so that was what love led to. to wound and be wounded.

brute: poems - emily skaja, belovéd - yves olade, lie from peripety (2008) - jen mazza, we are hard - margaret atwood, tumblr user @heavensghost, olivia (1949) - dorothy bussy (née strachey).

[thensson]

love as a wound

Olivia, Dorothy Strachey || The Roots Around my Ribcage, Seyda Noire || Saint Catherine Drinks the Blood of Christ, Francesco Vanni || The Last Motel Before a Decade's Long Purgatory, Silas Denver Melvin || Roberto Ferri || The Stream of Life, Clarice Lispector || Underbelly, Nicole Homer || The Incredulity of Saint Thomas, Guercino || The Encounter, Louise Gluck || The Waves, Virginia Woolf

[holeymolars]

"But there was no need of wine to intoxicate me. Everything in her proximity was intoxicating."

Olivia, Dorothy Strachey Bussy (1949)

[sassmill]

“Yet oh! I sighed, how willingly I would die to make her happy.”

[edwardian-girl-next-door]

Dorothy Strachey, Olivia: A Novel (1949)

[la-cocotte-de-paris]

OKAY SAPPHICS WE ARE SETTLING THIS ONCE AND FOR ALL

[jennamacaroni]

I sat on my bed and tried to compose myself.  And still, do what I would, hope came to interfere with my thoughts, my resolves.  How hard it is to kill hope!  Time after time, one thinks one has trodden it down, stamped it to death.  Time after time, like a noxious insect, it begins to stir again, it shivers back again into a faint tremulous life.  Once more it worms its way into one's heart, to instill its poison, to gnaw away the solid hard foundations of life and leave in their place the hollow phantom of illusion.

Dorothy Strachey, “Olivia”

[methodwriting]

rip dorothy strachey you would've done numbers on tumblr

[queerographies]

[Vite inarrestabili][Claudio Gargano]

L'omosessualità femminile ha plasmato la letteratura del Novecento inglese in modo significativo. Il libro "Vite inarrestabili" di Claudio Gargano esplora opere di nove scrittrici, rivelando il tema come riflesso dei cambiamenti sociali.

Oltre le apparenze: come l’omosessualità femminile ha plasmato la letteratura del Novecento Titolo: Vite inarrestabili. L’omosessualità femminile nella letteratura inglese del NovecentoScritto da: Claudio GarganoEdito da: OdoyaAnno: 2024Pagine: 224ISBN: 9788862888752 La sinossi di Vite inarrestabili di Claudio Gargano Leggere le opere di queste nove scrittrici significa gettare uno sguardo su…

[quotation--marks]

None of my doubts were ever solved with any certainty. I still sometimes puzzle over them. I am still constantly baffled. Psychological or material objections seem to block the way to every solution, and yet the solution, we know, exists; it is there, like a lost jewel, close at hand perhaps, if only some power would give us eyes to see it.

Dorothy Strachey, Olivia

[captainraven21]

“In the meantime, I brush her hair and go on my knees before her and cut her nails. That is enough for me. It wouldn’t be for you. Your share has been something more. But you have had to pay for it.”

Cut me like a knife

[scrivisempreamezzanotte]

Guess who bought Olivia by Dorothy Bussy cause she's actually a STRACHEY and Is BISEXUAL and had an affair with lady ottoline and dedicated Olivia to the memory of Virginia Woolf and the book was also first published by the Hogarth Press. So yes I spent some real adult money on a first edition to add to my Bloomsbury collection

[zealoussy]

OLIVIA - DOROTHY STRACHEY REVIEW

General Book Information

Title : Olivia

Author : Dorothy Strachey

Genre : Classics, Queer Lit, Fiction

Released : 1949

Book Summary

Olivia may seem like any other teenage girl from middle class in London, but her upbringing is not so common. Having been raised by agnostic parents, Olivia finally finds relief when her parents decide to take her abroad. Thus freeing her from the suffocating conformity in her previous religiously-oriented school. In her new school, not only does she have to adapt to the beauty of France, she also has to adapt to her newfound discovery about herself.

Likes/Dislikes

What I like the most while reading this book is the beautiful writing style. It’s lyrical, it’s majestic. it knows the depth of a woman’s heart.

“But there was no need of wine to intoxicate me. Everything in her proximity was intoxicating.”

At first I found it a little bit difficult to grasp her writing style, but it gets you used to it very quickly. Even hooked on it. For a character like Olivia, who still has her naivety on her sleeve, that kind of monologue is very fitting. The character of Olivia is not a complicated one, but because it’s not, it’s harder to make the reader's attention on her- yet Olivia managed.

She’s young and madly in love. In a place where her target desire is near, she loves with every inch of her being. She's courageous, maybe because she's naive like that. Even then, in her world where human desire is only allowed if it's legalized, she's struggling with the inability to express her affection openly. Well, that struggle being an age-gap amongst many others… It's not hard to imagine that Olivia doesn't get it easy. I get that the center of the story is Olivia’s experience with same-sex love towards her headmistress, but it is unclear what the actual conflict the love interest has. I only noted that there are hints of the love interest’s past, but it never actually gets revealed. Although mentioning this and that without actually diving deep into the love interest’s backstory made her a mysterious person, it threw me off of the pace. It feels incomplete. I need to know the motif behind the headmistress’s pull-push attitude to Olivia. But alas, the story ended too quickly before I had discovered the explanation. Don’t get me wrong, attempts were made. But just that they’re not good enough for me. Maybe I expected big since I got attached to the lyrical writing style, still, it sort of fell short in my experience.

Would you recommend this book?

Honestly? No. But if you want some quotable words to read, feel free to do so. I’m finicky when it comes to rating, and I think you’ll find yourself enjoying a better fleshed out queer classic story than this.

Favorite Quotes

“I understand at last. Life, life, life, this is life, full of overflowing with every ecstasy and every agony. It is mine, mine to hug, to exhaust, to drain.”

“If it depended on altering the feelings in my heart, I was no more capable of doing that than of plucking the heart out of my breast-and I didn't want to.”

“How hard it is to kill hope! Time after time, one thinks one has trodden it down, stamped it to death. Time after time, like a noxious insect, it begins to stir again, it shivers back again into a faint tremulous life. Once more it worms its way into one's heart, to instill its poison, to gnaw away the solid hard foundations of life and leave in their place the hollow phantom of illusion.”

“‘It has been a struggle all my life—but I have always been victorious-I was proud of my victory.’ And then her voice changed, broke, deepened, softened, became a murmur: ‘I wonder now whether defeat wouldn't have been better for us all-as well as sweeter.’"

[holeymolars]

"For after that first time there was always part of me standing aside, comparing, analysing, objecting: "Is this real? Is this sincere?" All the world of my predecessors was there before me, taking, as it were, the bread out of my mouth. Was this stab in my heart, this rapture, really mine or had I merely read about it? For every feeling, every vicissitude of my passion, there would spring into my mind a quotation from the poets. Shakespeare or Donne or Heine had the exact phrase for it. Comforting, perhaps, but enraging too. Nothing ever seemed spontaneously my own. As the blood dripped from the wound, there was always part of me to watch with a smile and a sneer: "Literature! Mere literature! Nothing to make a fuss about! And then I would add, "But so Mercutio jested as he died!""

Olivia, Dorothy Strachey Bussy (1949)

[sassmill]

Just started reading Olivia and oh man 8 pages in I’m already going crazy going stupid “love has always been the chief business of my life” shut up “nothing ever seemed spontaneously my own” shut UP

[rosamundpkes]

"And so that was what love led to. To wound and be wounded." — Dorothy Strachey