This account of what happens to me during a year that I spent at school in France seems to me to fall into the shape of a story-a short, simple one, with two or three character and a very few episodes. As Bussy writes in the opening pages of the novel, The narrator, Olivia, offers readers a tour through her life as a precocious sixteen-year-old experiencing both intellectual and sexual awakenings.Īn older woman reminiscing on her troubled romantic past, the narrator, Olivia, offers readers a tour through her life as a precocious sixteen-year-old experiencing both intellectual and sexual awakenings as her attractive and cultured instructor, Mademoiselle Julie, takes her under her wing. Run by entrepreneurial couple, Virginia and Leonard Woolf, Hogarth Press dared to publish anything, even if it invited scandal. This was Olivia, first published in 1949 by the Hogarth Press. One fruit of her experimental labors was an autobiographical novel that depicts her thinly disguised coming-of-age experience of falling in love with a teacher while studying at an all-girls boarding school in France. And, like the rest of her family and social circle, she dabbled in writing. Married to painter Simon Bussy, she identified as bisexual and had love affairs with both men and women, yet she never achieved the notoriety of other promiscuous artists of the age. As the sister of successful biographer Lytton Strachey, she associated with the bohemian Bloomsbury group in the early twentieth century, but she was never fully integrated into it. Like her novel, Dorothy Bussy née Strachey (1865–1960) was a woman who existed on the margins. It retains that unmistakable classical, thoughtful, and wise-to-the-world vein that is almost courtly in its depiction of how desire, arousal, and love can swell between individuals who are unwilling to speak their love or unable to abandon themselves to what each knows the other craves.

As he wrote in the introduction to the 2020 edition of Olivia , However, André Aciman, author of the coming-of-age novel Call Me by Your Name, considers Olivia the spiritual ancestor to his own modern explorations of young, struggling queer love. In fact, despite the success of the eponymous lesbian-oriented Olivia Travel (originally Olivia Records), few contemporary readers know much about it. Dorothy Bussy’s novel Olivia rarely makes it onto recommendation lists.

Olivia by Dorothy Strachey