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STRACHEY, [Rachel] Ray.
"The Cause."
A Short History of the Women's Movement in Great Britain.
First edition. Born Rachel Costelloe, Strachey was educated at Newnham and Bryn Mawr, before attending lectures in electrical engineering at Oxford. "In 1909 Ray Costelloe had met and become very attached to the Strachey family, to which she became formally connected through her marriage, on 31 May 1911, to Oliver Strachey... Though born into a family of feminists it was not until she went to Newnham that Ray became interested in women's suffrage. Her friend Ellie Rendel (a niece of Lytton Strachey) took her to suffrage meetings, and together they organized further meetings at Newnham and established a short-lived Younger Women's Suffrage group. When she left university Ray became increasingly involved in suffrage organization... she became a member of the moderate constitutionalist London Society for Women's Suffrage. There she began her lifelong collaboration with her close friend and, later, sister-in-law, Philippa Strachey. 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 addition to her feminist work Strachey had a lifelong career as a writer. Her first novel, The World at Eighteen (1907), was published while she was in her teens and was followed by a stream of fiction and biography... Her best-known and most successful book, The Cause (1928), was for many decades regarded as the classic account of the English women's movement." (ODNB) Included as Appendix I is "Cassandra," a previously unpublished essay on the position of women in society by Florence Nightingale.
Octavo. Original brown cloth, title gilt to spine, in dust jacket. Frontispiece and 15 other plates. Contemporary ownership inscription to the front free endpaper, some light foxing to prelims and fore-edge, otherwise very good, the jacket just a little rubbed with some short splits and minor loss.
