ABSTRACT
Friends and Apostles: The Correspondence of Rupert Brooke and James Strachey, 1905-1914 1 records a moving love story. Rupert Brooke and James Strachey first met as boys of ten at Hillbrow School. Brooke was the son of a housemaster at Rugby, while Strachey was a member of one of England’s most illustrious literary families. Strachey’s older brother Lytton became a leading figure in the Bloomsbury group. Both Brooke, who attended King’s College, and Strachey, a member of Trinity College, were elected to Cambridge’s famous society called “the Apostles.” I can still remember my shock at discovering that the Apostles, described so eloquently in moral and intellectual terms in one of the volumes of Leonard Woolf’s autobiography, was also programmatically homosexual. Brooke and Strachey were eighteen years old when they renewed their acquaintance at Cambridge, which marks the beginning of this collection of letters. Shortly after Strachey’s death in 1967, his wife Alix sold the correspondence to the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library.
