Upon her arrival, Olivia becomes captivated by Mademoiselle Julie-who runs the school alongside another woman, Mademoiselle Cara-when she first recognizes her attraction during an evening gathering when Julie reads aloud from a Racine play.
Strachey casts herself in her novel as the young and fiercely intelligent Olivia, the narrator of this blistering account of adolescent desire and first love who’s sent at the age of sixteen from her home in England to a finishing school just outside of Paris. Its truth has been filtered, transposed, and, maybe, superficially altered, as is inevitably the case with all autobiographies. It is informed with a single motive, tends to a single end, moves quickly and undeviatingly to a final catastrophe. This account of what happened 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 characters and very few episodes.
As they grow closer, their relationship is threatened by jealousy and rivalry, and the school year seems destined to end in tragedy.In the introduction to her short autobiographical novel Olivia, the newly rereleased lesbian classic published anonymously by the Bloomsbury Group in 1949, fifteen years after her friend André Gide’s polite dismissal of its merits, Dorothy Strachey writes: But Mademoiselle Julie’s life is not as straightforward as Olivia imagines. Soon after her arrival, she finds herself falling under the spell of her beautiful and charismatic teacher, Mademoiselle Julie, who introduces her to art, literature, and fine cuisine. It tells the story of Olivia, a sixteen-year-old girl who is sent from England to a Parisian finishing school to broaden her education.
Olivia, first published in 1949 and loosely based on the author’s life, is a groundbreaking, passionate, and subtle story of first love. He will be in conversation with writer Stacy D’Erasmo ( Wonderland, The Art of Intimacy) to discuss the novel’s impact. Donate $10 to Help Support Our ProgrammingĬritically acclaimed author André Aciman credits Dorothy Strachey’s Olivia, reissued by Penguin Classics this June with an introduction by Aciman himself, as inspiration for his Call Me By Your Name.
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