Ray Strachey

Ray Strachey (born Rachel Pearsall Conn Costelloe; 4 June 1887 – 16 July 1940) was a British feminist politician, artist and writer.

[1] Her father was Irish barrister Benjamin "Frank" Conn Costelloe, and her mother was art historian Mary Berenson.

Ray was educated at Kensington high school and at Newnham College, Cambridge, where she achieved third class in part one of the mathematical tripos (1908).

[4] For most of her life, Strachey worked for women's suffrage organisations, starting when she was studying at Cambridge, when she joined what became known as the Mud March in February 1907 and addressing meetings in summer 1907.

[7] Strachey worked closely with Millicent Fawcett, sharing her Liberal feminist values and opposing any attempt to integrate the suffrage movement with the Labour Party.

[10] Women were employed to assemble them but there were problems with sourcing the correct clay and the chimney builders refused to co-operate.

Ray's mother-in-law was Jane Maria Strachey, a well-known author and supporter of women's suffrage who co-led the suffragist Mud March of 1907 in London.

The interviews include reflections on their home, Mud House, and on Ray's relationships with her husband, mother and sister-in-law, Pippa.

[16] She died in the Royal Free Hospital in London in her early fifties of heart failure, following an operation to remove a fibroid tumor.

[17] Her name and picture (and those of 58 other women's suffrage supporters) are on the plinth of the statue of Millicent Fawcett in Parliament Square, London, unveiled in April 2018.

Ray Costelloe and others on the suffrage caravan tour from Scotland to Oxford in 1908
Millicent Fawcett , Agnes Garrett , Miss Fawcett and Ray Strachey after Royal Assent to the Equal Franchise Act in 1928
Brentford & Chiswick within the Middlesex, showing boundaries used from 1918 to 1923
Painting by Ray Strachey of her sister-in-law Pernel Strachey .