All We Know: Three Lives by Lisa Cohen Page B

“but…does not depend on you in any way—emotionally, intellectually, or actually; nor is she, as far as I can perceive, waiting for you as the one hope and solution of her life. She does believe that some sort of equality is possible between you, or that in any case some arrangement of your lives can be made which will prove less disastrous and ridiculous than this.” Strachey’s career was also in turmoil. Oswald Mosley had resigned dramatically from the Labour government, and in 1931  he, Strachey, and a few others founded the New Party, a short-lived experiment in opposition. But Strachey soon withdrew, seeing Mosley’s turn to the right, and in the October election of that year he lost his seat in Parliament. Mosley went on to found the British Union of Fascists.
    The women in John Strachey’s family were not threatened or disgusted by Esther the way his male friends were. On the contrary: “She is a hero and a goddess,” his sister Amabel wrote to him. “I have seen a good many great women, but never one to surpass Esther, and never one so vulnerable and inexperienced and exposed to the hard fate of being a human being.” His mother could be forbidding—she was tall and thin and looked “like a Victorian coat stand,” wrote Celia, “with scarves & chains and lace and shawls hanging from her”—but she adored Esther and emphatically took her side. Amy Strachey had encouraged her son’s trip to the United States in 1928 as a way to separate him from Celia; she refused to see him when he was living with Celia in 1932; and she did not attend their wedding in the autumn of 1933, immediately after Esther and John divorced. “My heart quite literally bleeds when I think of” Esther, she wrote to Gerald. When Esther remarried, five years later, Amy Strachey told her that her new husband was “charming,—almost worthy of you, but you know my feelings that nobody is quite.”
    Within a few years, Esther and John Strachey had become friends. On her last trip to Europe before the war, in the spring of 1937, she visited him and Celia. Twice in the 1930s, on lecture tours of the United States, he was incarcerated at Ellis Island, accused of being a Communist advocating the violent overthrow of the U.S. government, a charge based on Hearst press pressure on the Department of Labor. In both cases, Esther pulled every string she could in Washington, even contacting FDR, and she wrote to Amy Strachey to reassure her. Strachey went on to have a long career as a leading theorist of the Labour Party and in world democratic socialism. The Coming Struggle for Power , his 1932 primer on the logics of capitalism and communism, is still seen as one of the most cogent expositions of the economic situation of the time. He helped found the Left Book Club, a populist publishing venture that produced millions of volumes (by George Orwell, Arthur Koestler, and others) and helped shift the British national consciousness to the left, enabling Labour’s postwar ascendance. He was a member of Parliament and he continued to publish on economics and empire until his death in 1963. Esther liked and admired him.
    But in New York in 1932, as she waited for him to come to a decision about whether to divorce, she was miserable. She faced and avoided her own failings, writing to him about eighteenth-century French history, not about their marriage, telling friends that it had not worked out because she belonged in New York, not London. She lived in a hotel and depended on Amanda and Gilbert Seldes. On Christmas Eve at their home, she pulled off her wedding ring and gave it to their young daughter, Marian. She had no real financial independence, because Patrick Murphy had made a “dotty…eccentric will” that appointed Gerald her trustee until she was fifty-five, meaning that she did not actually own the shares of Mark Cross her father had left her. Even if she had been capable of steady work, it would have been hard to find. Across