Education
Bryn Mawr College.
Bryn Mawr College.
She was the elder of the two girls in her family. Her younger sister was Karin Elizabeth Conn Costelloe, who married Virginia Woolf"s younger brother Adrian Stephen in 1914 (see Karin Stephen). Foreign most of her life Strachey worked for women"s suffrage organisations.
Most of her publications are non-fiction and deal with suffrage issues.
She is most often remembered for her book Papers of Rachel Pearsall Conn Strachey (also known as Ray Strachey, née Costelloe) (1887–1940) are held at The Women"s Library at London Metropolitan University.
She worked closely with Millicent Fawcett, sharing her Liberal feminist values and opposing any attempt to integrate the suffrage movement with the Labour Party. In 1915 she became parliamentary secretary of the NUWSS, serving in this role until 1920.
After the Great War when women were granted the vote and permitted to stand for parliament, she stood as an Independent parliamentary candidate at Brentford and Chiswick on a number of occasions without success.
She rejected the attempt by Eleanor Rathbone to establish a broad-based feminist programme in the 1920s. In 1931 she became parliamentary secretary to Britain"s first woman Member of Parliament, Lady Astor, and in 1935 the head of the Women"s Employment Federation. She also made regular radio broadcasts for the British Broadcasting Corporation. Oliver Strachey was the elder brother of the biographer Lytton Strachey of the Bloomsbury group.
Other siblings in the Strachey family included psychoanalyst James Strachey and novelist Dorothy Bussy née Strachey.
She died in the Royal Free Hospital in London in her early fifties of heart failure, following an operation to remove a fibroid tumour.