On "Olivia," by Olivia, starring Olivia

There wasn't much lesbo lit out there in 1949, when Dorothy Strachey Bussy anonymously published "Olivia," her semi-autobiographical tale of a student's boarding school crush on the headmistress. The book's first edition was printed by the press founded by Leonard and Virginia Woolf and it's a classic, number 35 on one top 100 gay and lesbian book list.

Naive 16-year-old English schoolgirl Olivia finds that love awakens her to the world: "Every page of the Latin grammar seemed to hold some passionate secret which must be mine or I should die. Words! How astonishing they were. The simplest bore with it such an aura of music and romance as wafted me into fairyland. Geography! Oh to sit poring and wondering over an atlas. Here were pagodas. There the Nile. Jungles. Deserts. Coral islands in the Pacific ringed round with lagoons. The eternal snows of the Himalayas. Aurora Borealis flaming at the pole. Worlds upon worlds of magic revealed. Why had I never known of them before? History! Those men! Those heroes! How they looked, how they smiled as they were going to the block or the stake! And what had they died for? Faith, liberty, truth, humanity. What did these words really represent? They mustn't rest till I found out. And the peoples! The poor sheep-like peoples! These too must be thought of. Not yet. I dare not yet. There will be time enough for that later."

This is a chaste novel, filled with classical and literary references (Racine, Keats, Piranesi) and untranslated French and Italian verse, all the better to situate it as art rather than pervert propaganda. Perhaps this was a necessity: Radclyffe Hall's "The Well of Loneliness" was censored a mere 20 years earlier.

Sadly, Olivia turns out to be a bit of a dunce. She can't understand why the headmistress, who initially seems so taken with her, pulls back. It's fine and dandy to be clueless and unsympathetic at 16, but Olivia's continued lack of empathy years later is truly awful.

In the end, headmistress Mlle Julie runs off to Canada (a queer refuge even back then!) with an enamoured maidservant who is content just to cut Julie's toenails. The former headmistress tries to say good-bye to her student: "'It has been a struggle all my life -- but I have always been victorious -- I was proud of my victory,'" says Mlle Julie. "And then her voiced changed, broke, deepened, softened, became a murmur: 'I wonder now whether defeat wouldn't have been better for us all -- as well as sweeter.'"

Olivia finds the words meaningless, and sulks off. I'd argue that Olivia's refusal to accept the forbidden nature of this love is actually a grand step forward that forces the reader to think, but Olivia comes to believe she was never loved in the first place, so the reader is actually sent into a different direction.

The New York Times Book Review called it "a narrative of sheer emotion... 'Olivia' achieves the purity of classic tragedy." As was required, of course, in 1949. The reviewer was willfully dense herself, calling Olivia a novel of adolescent rebellion, rather than one of lesbian love. Isn't denial grand? It builds character.


For historical details, thanks to American historian Jonathan Ned Katz's 1983 "Gay and Lesbian Almanac," an essential reference work.