Tanya Harrod at Literary Review:
As Dorothy Rowe’s classic study My Dearest Enemy, My Dangerous Friend explains, sibling relationships – invariably intense, often fraught – are among the most underexamined of familial connections. Although every sibling strives to create a unique place in the world, inescapably their longest relationships will be with loved, ignored or actively disliked brothers and sisters.
Gifted siblings with intertwined lives present a fascinating challenge for the biographer. William and Dorothy Wordsworth’s interdependence has been dissected skilfully by Lucy Newlyn; Erika and Klaus Mann were the subject of a brilliant study by Andrea Weiss. Then there is The Knox Brothers, Penelope Fitzgerald’s strange and absorbing book about her father and his three siblings, undoubtedly a work of art which also happens to illuminate four relatively unknown figures. The historian Barbara Caine’s From Bombay to Bloomsbury, a multiple biography of the ten children of Richard and Jane Strachey, is another unexpected triumph, giving as much attention to Richard and Ralph Strachey, two older brothers who were obscure colonial functionaries, as to the younger siblings, the glittering essayist Lytton Strachey and his sister Dorothy, frustrated admirer of André Gide and author of the novel Olivia, a delicate, anonymously published study of schoolgirl lesbian passion.
more here.
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