Barbara Caine has taken on the daunting task of writing a biography of not just one member of the Strachey family, but of all twelve, as well as their noteworthy in-laws. Spanning more than one hundred years, this collective biography traces the generational continuities and changes in one upper-middle-class British family and how the lives of its individual members intersected with larger historical trends and events.

While Bloomsbury scholars continue to devote their attention to Lytton Strachey (more for his sexuality than his literary achievements), Caine points out that even the least-known members of the Strachey family can tell us about the complicated and uneven shift from Victorianism to “modernity.” In fact, Lytton's constant complaints about the stuffy values of his parents and older siblings seem to lose much of their impact as Caine illustrates just how progressive the Strachey parents were for their day. Though pillars of the Anglo-Indian establishment, Richard and Jane Strachey were also agnostics, passionate about science and literature, and champions of female higher education and suffrage. Twenty-three years her husband's junior, Jane was hardly a typical Victorian wife and mother, devoting most of her time to public life and relying on her older daughters to run the home. Even the eldest daughter, Elinor, whose main accomplishment was an advantageous marriage, marched alongside the suffragists, sent her daughters to university, and wrote poetry.

A thirty-year span separated the oldest and youngest Strachey siblings, and even for its time, an upper-middle-class family of ten surviving children was quite large (strangely, the parents’ progressive views did not seem to encompass birth control, even though Jane and her relatives expressed dismay at so many births, her last at age forty-nine). Richard's continued absences from England as he served the empire in India made his a shadowy presence among his children, but they felt the weight of that presence nonetheless. The eldest sons, in particular, were expected to follow their father's example but found little pleasure or professional success in India. Unhappy marriages to mentally unstable and promiscuous women (though we only get the Strachey version here) also tainted the sons’ experience of India. But daughter Philippa (Pippa) blossomed in India; the family name that so burdened the sons opened many doors for their sister. Her trip to India in 1900 encouraged her independent spirit, and she returned to England to make a full-time, though unpaid, career as a feminist activist.

Contrast Pippa's story with that of youngest sister Marjorie, sandwiched between the mother's two favorites, Lytton and James. As the only Strachey unlucky enough to be plump, Marjorie craved attention, but her lack of social graces only further mortified family and friends—as she became known for reciting obscene nursery rhymes at parties, often in tights or in the nude! Curiously, such behavior was celebrated at Bloomsbury parties when performed by men. Despite their differences, all of the siblings were lumped together by, and conscious of, their family name, which called to friends’ and strangers’ minds alike, particular traits: the lanky frame (except for poor Marjorie), the bespectacled eyes, the high-pitched voice, and the clever wit. The final chapter movingly shows how as the siblings aged, with so few of them having had children, they clung to each other, forgetting their previous disagreements. Once one of the most prominent families in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England, the Stracheys had truly become what Leonard Woolf once called “an extinct phenomenon which has passed away and will never be known again” (406).

While Caine addresses particular themes, such as the changing place of men and women in the family and the impact of gender and modernity on various members, she also organizes several chapters around life stages: childhood, education, adult life, careers, literary accomplishments, and even death. This sometimes leads to repetition of specific events, even duplicated quotes from diaries and letters, but she treats each person's story with such care that the most mundane details about childhood become interesting in her hands. From the start, she makes clear that she is writing a feminist biography, and indeed her strongest chapters focus on how the Stracheys saw themselves as transgressors, from patriarch Richard Strachey proudly defending women's rights at dinner parties in India to daughter Pernel advocating the full admission of women into Cambridge and son James promoting Freud's theories about infantile sexuality. Yet, as Caine points out, there is no clear-cut distinction between the Victorian and modern members of this multigenerational family, as even the most “modern” among them also clung to Victorian traditions and roles, and the women's feminism took on a variety of forms. Pippa, for example, took time out of her crusade for suffrage and employment for women to play nursemaid to her parents, male siblings, and other relatives. While she refused to acknowledge Lytton's homosexuality, he often failed to support his sisters’ careers or join their marches. The younger women were especially ambivalent about the activist approach to feminism; Dora Carrington and Alix Strachey saw “sexual freedom and the ability to live as they chose … as far more important than the vote” (325), and even Pippa amusedly observed that she had now become “a sort of museum piece” (319) in the eyes of the younger, postwar feminists.

Finally, Caine's selection of photographs reveals the Strachey's individual personalities as well as their dependence on one another. The cover photo (all twelve posed in prayerful medieval style) especially reminds us that this family, while aware of its traditions and public importance, also had a sense of humor. Outsiders commented on how entertaining an evening with the Stracheys could be—as they all debated in their high-pitched voices, danced, or performed plays. No wonder that Ray Costello fell in love, not with Oliver, but with the entire family, and married the womanizer so that she could gain entry to this household. Like Ray, Caine's readers will be fascinated by this family whose appeal reaches out not just to Bloomsbury aficionados but to students of literary biography, imperial history, and feminism.