Julia Strachey

JULIA STRACHEY (1901-79) was born in India, where her father, one of Lytton Strachey's elder brothers, worked in the Civil Service; her mother, Ruby Mayer, was  Swiss-German. Julia lived with relations in England after her parents divorced and went to Bedales and to the Slade; she then worked as a model at Poiret, as a photographer and as a publisher's reader.  She was married to the sculptor Stephen Tomlin from 1927-34, wrote short stories for magazines, and in 1932 Cheerful Weather for the Wedding was published by The Hogarth Press. Virginia Woolf wrote: 'I think it astonishingly good - complete and sharp and individual.'  Her 1951 novel The Man on the Pier was republished by Penguin in 1978 as An Integrated Man.  In 1939 Julia met the art critic Lawrence Gowing, who was 21; they spent thirty years 'constantly in each other's company', fifteen of them married, in Newcastle and in Chelsea, where he ran the art schools.