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I imagine that any publisher would salivate at the prospect of producing a book with this title. The private letters of James Strachey and his wife, Alix, written during the period when she was residing in Berlin, the Capital of Decadence, undergoing psychoanalysis with Karl Abraham, and he was in London just starting his own psychoanalytic practice and his translations of Freud, exchanging the news and gossip of both the psychoanalytic community and the Bloomsbury world—how delicious!
At least two different sets of customers would buy such a book, each set capable of supporting the publication—the literati, the aficionados of the exquisite sensibilities of Virginia Woolf, the Webbs, Lytton Strachey, Clive and Vanessa Bell, John Maynard Keynes, Leonard Woolf, and the rest of the Bloomsbury group; and that large amorphous group interested in the history, the gossip, the internal warfare, and the theory and practice of psychoanalysis.
The reader, too, upon first viewing the book, experiences the thrill of anticipation. This book promises the sexual and moral decadence of Bloomsbury, celebrated in the ambiguous works of Virginia Woolf, the oeuvres of the Sitwells, and the novels of E. M. Forster, illuminated by the light of psychoanalysis. What a feast!
And indeed, the hors d'oeuvres alone are all one could wish for. The editors' introduction describes the sexual atmosphere current at the time in Bloomsbury, and details the homosexuality of both James Strachey and his brother, Lytton. Juicy tidbits include statements such as the following, culminating with the description from a letter of James Strachey to his cousin Duncan Grant: “I am engaged to bugger the O.B. (Oscar Browning, a close friend of Walter Pater) on Sunday, at lunch.” Six days later James wrote his cousin a letter that included the following description:
I paused for a moment in the anteroom, which presented its usual appearance, and slipped off my light overcoat: then, while with one hand I smoothed back my