Dorothy Bussy

24 July 1865 - 01 May 1960

As a writer DB is best known for Olivia, her immensely successful, anonymous or rather pseudonymous, autobiographical novel, published in 1949, about a young girl's development at a French boarding school in the later nineteenth century. She was also a translator, who spent many years rendering André Gide 's writings into English, a journalist, and an art critic.

BirthName: Dorothea Strachey
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.
Self-constructed: Dorothy
She always called herself Dorothy in preference to the form of the name by which she was christened.
Married: Bussy
Pseudonym: Olivia

Milestones

24 July 1865

Dorothy Strachey (later DB ) was born, the third of the thirteen Strachey children.

Some sources date her birth to 1866.

Lambert, Jean et al. “Introduction”. Selected Letters of André Gide and Dorothy Bussy, edited by Richard Tedeschi and Richard Tedeschi, Oxford University Press, 1983, p. vii - xxiii.

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1904

DB , who later became known for translating much of Gide 's fiction, first reached print with her translation of Auguste Bréal 's Velasquez.

Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.

1949

DB published her autobiographical lesbian novel, Olivia, with the Hogarth Press . The work carries the pseudonymous ascription by Olivia.

British Library Catalogue. http://explore.bl.uk/primo_library/libweb/action/search.do?dscnt=0&tab=local_tab&dstmp=1489778087340&vid=BLVU1&mode=Basic&fromLo.

Clapp, Susannah, and Dorothy Bussy. “Afterword”. Olivia, Virago, 1987, pp. 111-14.

111

1 May 1960

DB died of old age

Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.

at ninety-four. Her daughter Janie Bussy had died as the result of an accident only weeks before this, but Dorothy was senile, and so did not know of Janie's death.

Caws, Mary Ann, and Sarah Bird Wright. Bloomsbury and France: Art and Friends. Oxford University Press, 2000.

348

Biography

Birth

24 July 1865

Dorothy Strachey (later DB ) was born, the third of the thirteen Strachey children.

Some sources date her birth to 1866.

Lambert, Jean et al. “Introduction”. Selected Letters of André Gide and Dorothy Bussy, edited by Richard Tedeschi and Richard Tedeschi, Oxford University Press, 1983, p. vii - xxiii.

viii