Authority, honour and the Strachey family, 1817-1974

The Strachey family, like other professional families in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, transformed concepts of honour and authority. Rather than rooting such concepts in the values of birth and wealth, the Stracheys realized and utilized the ironic possibilities in the conventions of their time to reshape their understanding of the ways that they fit into the world. The Stracheys were a literary family. In things Indian and imperial, in things French, and in psychoanalysis they negotiated the discontinuities and uncertainties of the modern world in their drive for power, place, meaning, intimacy and a different kind of authority.