Wife Alix Sargant-Florence Strachey
Queer Places:
University of Cambridge, 4 Mill Ln, Cambridge CB2 1RZ
41 Gordon Square, Kings Cross, London WC1H, Regno Unito
James Beaumont Strachey (26 September 1887, London – 25 April 1967, High
Wycombe) was a British
psychoanalyst, and, with his wife
Alix
Sargant-Florence, a translator of
Sigmund Freud into English. He is perhaps best known as the general editor
of
The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud
... the international authority".[1]
He was part of the Cambridge
Apostles.
He was a son of Lt-Gen Sir Richard Strachey and Lady (Jane) Strachey, called the enfant miracle as his father was 70 and his mother 47. Some of his nieces and nephews, who were considerably older than James, called him Jembeau or Uncle Baby. His parents had thirteen children, of whom ten lived to adulthood.
He was educated at Hillbrow preparatory school in Rugby and at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he took over the rooms used by his older brother Lytton Strachey, and was known as "the Little Strachey"; Lytton was now "the Great Strachey". At Cambridge, Strachey fell deeply in love with the poet Rupert Brooke, who did not return his affections. He was himself pursued by mountaineer George Mallory—conceding to his sexual advances—by Harry Norton, and by economist John Maynard Keynes, with whom he also had an affair. His love of Brooke was a constant, however, until the latter's death in 1915, which left Strachey "shattered".
On the imposition of military conscription in 1916, during World War I, James became a conscientious objector.
James was assistant editor of The Spectator, and a member of the Bloomsbury Group or "Bloomsberries" when he became familiar with Alix Sargant Florence, though they first met in 1910. They moved in together in 1919 and married in 1920.
Soon afterwards they moved to Vienna, where James began a psychoanalysis with Freud, of whom he was a great admirer. He would claim to Lytton that his analysis "provided 'a complete undercurrent for life'".[2] Freud asked the couple to translate some of his works into English, and this became their lives' work: they became “my excellent English translators, Mr and Mrs James Strachey”.[3]
James Strachey
Duncan Grant (1885–1978)
Tate
My published books:
