Lot 50
Strachey, Lytton (1880-1932)
Four autograph letters signed to F. L. Lucas
Auction: 16 June 2026 from 10:00 BST
Description
Tidmarsh & Hungerford, 1919-27. Two dated 1919-20, each a single sheet of Strachey's Mill House stationery (23 x 18cm and 18 x 11.5cm) written on one side only, two dated 1927, each a single bifolium of Strachey's Ham Spray House, Hungerford stationery, written on 2 and 3 sides, subjects including a a possible reference to the Apostles ('do let me know how the Society is getting on'), a review by Lucas in the Athenaeum, the progress of Elizabeth and Essex, 1928, ('I curse that woman - why didn't she fall a victim to the knife of a Jesuit? Why wasn't the Armada victorious?'), and Lucas's edition of John Webster, 1927 ('a magnificent work') (4)
Provenance
By direct descent from F. L. Lucas.
Footnote
The Cambridge literary scholar F. L. Lucas (1894-1967) was one of a younger generation of writers and artists whose achievements drew them into the orbit of the Bloomsbury group. Together with his sometime lover Dadie Rylands, also a fellow of King's College, Lucas formed ‘a kind of younger outpost of Bloomsbury in Cambridge', the pair providing ‘natural points of contact for the senior Bloomsbury figures when they came over from London or the country’, in which regard Lucas was at an advantage in being able to provide a house to stay in, rather than simply college rooms (Jones, ‘Carrington (And Woolf) in Cambridge', Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society, Vol. 13, No. 3 (2006), pp. 301-334).
Lucas's relationship with Strachey was complicated by Lucas's affair (at least an emotional one) during the late 1920s with Dora Carrington, who lived in a ménage-à-trois with her husband Ralph Partridge and Lytton Strachey at Strachey's Ham Spray House: ‘Ralph Partridge, still [Carrington’s] husband but by this time living most of the week in London with Frances Marshall, did not like her receiving letters from boyfriends, and was liable to explode if he came across them. This meant instructing [Lucas] only to write on weekdays when she was confident she could get to the letters before Ralph (on one occasion she had to hide Peter's letter beneath a hat on the hall chest and retrieve it later' (ibid.).