Upon her arrival, Olivia becomes captivated by Mademoiselle Julie-who runs the school alongside another woman, Mademoiselle Cara-when she first recognizes her attraction during an evening gathering when Julie reads aloud from a Racine play. Strachey casts herself in her novel as the young and fiercely intelligent Olivia, the narrator of this blistering account of adolescent desire and first love who’s sent at the age of sixteen from her home in England to a finishing school just outside of Paris. Its truth has been filtered, transposed, and, maybe, superficially altered, as is inevitably the case with all autobiographies. It is informed with a single motive, tends to a single end, moves quickly and undeviatingly to a final catastrophe. This account of what happened to me during a year that I spent at school in France seems to me to fall into the shape of a story-a short, simple one, with two or three characters and very few episodes. As they grow closer, their relationship is threatened by jealousy and rivalry, and the school year seems destined to end in tragedy.In the introduction to her short autobiographical novel Olivia, the newly rereleased lesbian classic published anonymously by the Bloomsbury Group in 1949, fifteen years after her friend André Gide’s polite dismissal of its merits, Dorothy Strachey writes: But Mademoiselle Julie's life is not as straightforward as Olivia imagines. Soon after her arrival, she finds herself falling under the spell of her beautiful and charismatic teacher, Mademoiselle Julie, who introduces her to art, literature, and fine cuisine. It tells the story of Olivia, a sixteen-year-old girl who is sent from England to a Parisian finishing school to broaden her education. The classic novel about a teenage girl's infatuation with her headmistress at a boarding school in nineteenth-century ParisĪ groundbreaking, passionate, and subtle story of first love, Olivia-based loosely on the author's own life-was first published in 1949 under a pseudonym. 'Perfectly captures the breathless excitement of adolescent passion.' -Sarah Waters, bestselling author of Fingersmith and Tipping the Velvet 'I read Olivia many, many times, bought it for many of my friends, and consider it the inspiration for Call Me by Your Name.' -André Aciman

Dorothy strachey