Mary Berenson

RS's mother, Mary (Pearsall Smith) Berenson, favoured the idea of matrilineage in her family. Ray's daughter and biographer, Barbara Strachey, writes: Descent ran, without question, from mother to daughter . ....

Shortly after the wedding, Julia became the charge of Alys Russell, a suffrage and temperance activist who was also the aunt of Ray (Costelloe) Strachey, sister of writer Logan Pearsall Smith and Mary Berenson

VL acknowledges several influences in her preface, including archaeologist Eugénie Sellers, Bernard Berenson, and Mary Logan (the pseudonym of Mary Smith Costelloe, future wife of Berenson). She closes with a Valedictory for...

RS loved cars; her mother thought her quite motor mad. As an early woman driver, she was brilliant and most resourceful, given to making long journeys in the middle of the night to avoid...

RS travelled to India with her sister and her husband, Oliver; on the way back they stopped at I Tatti (the Italian estate of her mother and Berenson), where Oliver resigned from his...