Word: stracheys
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...fashionable demimonde. He had private money and plenty of leisure. His contemporaries at Cambridge and, later, in London's Bloomsbury circle tolerated and applauded eccentricities. But Forster never wanted notoriety or much attention at all. His retiring manner earned him the nickname "the taupe" (the mole) from Lytton Strachey. Writing his mother about a projected meeting with Henry James, the young author was comically unassuming: "I hear he likes people to be handsome and well dressed, so I shall fail all round." He even construed his repressions as an example of good manners: "However gross my desires, I find...
...elegant lady from a landed family who encouraged the boys' brilliance: Ronnie was reading Virgil at the age of six. It was she who decreed the boarding schools they later attended: Eton for Dilly and Ronnie, Rugby for Eddie and Wilfred. Dilly went on to Cambridge, where Lytton Strachey fell in love with him (the compliment was not returned). The others went up to Oxford...
...learn Russian. For recreation this intensely introspective yet active woman walked, skated and rode horseback. She managed a town and a country house and, in Nigel Nicolson's phrase, led a "scintillating social life." When she had nothing else to do, she typed manuscripts for her friend Lytton Strachey (Eminent Victorians) or scurried to raise a fund of ?500 a year to free T.S. Eliot from his job at the bank. Despite this hectic, variegated life, she wrote up to six letters...
...though Ottoline remained with her husband. She was the inspiration for the character of Hermione Roddice in D.H. Lawrence's Women in Love, the eccentric baronness whose passion for the hero, Birkin, is more a contest of will than a deep emotion. She knew them all: Lytton Strachey, Virginia Woolf, T.S. Eliot, J.M. Keynes, Aldous Huxley, Henry Lamb, William Butler Yeats, Henry James...
...dance last night," she wrote at 23, "and found a dim corner where I sat and read In Memoriam. You see I am not successful." It was only in the rarefied atmosphere of Bloomsbury that her formidable mind and odd beauty were appreciated. Men like Clive Bell, Lytton Strachey and Roger Fry accepted her, flirted with her, and in some cases proposed. At one point she and the homosexual Strachey became engaged, but both came to realize their folly and amicably called...