Lytton Strachey (1880–1932)
Author of Eminent Victorians
About the Author
Lytton Strachey (1880-1932), among the most famous writers of his time, was a member of the Bloomsbury group and the author of a number of biographies
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Works by Lytton Strachey
Queen Victoria/Oliver Wendell Holmes/Rembrandt/Jesus of Nazareth (Reader's Digest Great Biographies) 8 copies
Arte de la biografía — Contributor — 3 copies
Uudessa 2 copies
Edward Gibbon : en essay 2 copies
Viktória királynő 1 copy
Voltaire 1 copy
Französische Paradiese Voltaire, Madame du Deffand, Mademoiselle de Lespinasse und Stendhal (2002) 1 copy
Ritratti in miniatura 1 copy
The Rousseau Affair 1 copy
Eminent Victorans 1 copy
Eminent Victorians 1 copy
Five Victorians 1 copy
Associated Works
Penguins 60s Classics (Loose as the Wind; Now Remember; Florence Nightingale; Rumpole and the Younger Generation; Elephant Tales; Scenes from Havian Life; Less is More Please;… (1996) — Contributor; Contributor — 12 copies
Tagged
Common Knowledge
- Canonical name
- Strachey, Lytton
- Legal name
- Strachey, Giles Lytton
- Birthdate
- 1880-03-01
- Date of death
- 1932-01-21
- Gender
- male
- Education
- Trinity College, Cambridge (BA|1903)
University of Liverpool
North Leamington School - Occupations
- biographer
critic
essayist
historian - Organizations
- Bloomsbury Group
Cambridge Apostles
The Midnight Society - Awards and honors
- Benson Medal
Chancellor's Medal (Trinity College) - Relationships
- Strachey, Dorothy (sister)
Strachey, James (brother)
Carrington, Dora (partner)
Strachey, Marjorie (sister)
Strachey, Julia (niece)
Strachey, Barbara (niece) (show all 8)
Strachey, Alix (sister-in-law)
Strachey, Ray (sister-in-law) - Short biography
- British biographer and essayist, who was part of the leftist arts and literature Bloomsbury Group, which gained notoriety for Bohemian lifestyles. He was born on March 1, 1880 in Clapham Common South Side, London, England. He was the son of Sir Richard Strachey, an Indian civil engineer and soldier. His mother was the essayist Lady Jane Strachey. He was named after his godfather, Robert Bulwer-Lytton, the First Earl of Lytton, and Viceroy of India. In 1899 he started at Trinity College where he became a member of the Apostles, making friends with G. E. Moore, John Maynard Keynes, E. M. Forster, Leonard Woolf, and Clive Bell, which all became members of the Bloomsbury Group. It was also during this time he began a close relationship with Keynes. Around 1915, he met Dora Carrington, a British artist, who would become extremely close to him. Eventually, the couple pledged their lives to each other to the point that in November of 1917, they began to cohabitate together. In 1921 after Carrington married Ralph Partridge, he and the couple would live together in a ménage à trois. He traveled with the newlyweds to Italy for a honeymoon. Outside of this arrangement were other published known relationships. Their nontraditional life style continued until she divorced Partridge, sometime after 1926. His posthumous letters and essays document their relationships. During his career, he wrote "Ely: An Ode," "Eminent Victorians," and "Queen Victoria" among others. He died on January 21, 1932 of stomach cancer. Although he left Carrington a monetary sum of his estate, his long-time companion, Carrington committed suicide two months later.
- Cause of death
- stomach cancer
- Nationality
- UK
- Birthplace
- Clapham, London, Middlesex, England, UK
- Places of residence
- London, Middlesex, England, UK
Ham Spray, Wiltshire, England, UK - Place of death
- Ham, Wiltshire, England, UK
- Burial location
- St. Andrew's Churchyard, Chew Magna, Bath and North East Somerset Unitary Authority, Somerset, England, UK
- Map Location
- England, UK
Members
Reviews
It would be amusing to put Lytton Strachey and Sir Francis Bacon in a box - like, say, a camel spider and a scorpion - to watch how they would fight. Lytton’s lashing stinger vs. Francis’s stridulating chelicerae. Ouch. Rattle. Ouch.
in Elizabeth and Essex, Strachey holds Bacon in low regard. Essex was a early patron of Bacon, and his loyal, if ineffectual, advocate in matters requiring Elizabeth’s beneficence. That loyalty was ultimately ill paid; Bacon chose to participate in the show more final prosecution of Essex. The Earl’s blunderous attempt at a coup d’etat predictably backfired. But better for Bacon, sub specie aeternitatis, to have abstained from the star chamber rather than take part in Essex’s fore-ordained destruction. Injecting his venom, Strachey labels Bacon’s reversed loyalty “serpentine”, thereby alluding to Bacon’s essay “On Truth, and turning back on the author his own words regarding civil falsehood “For these winding, and crooked courses, are the goings of the serpent; which goeth basely upon the belly, and not upon the feet.”
Bacon, were he allowed to rebut, would likely grind up in his pincers the psychological approach of Strachey to biography, in particular Strachey’s debt to Freud and Dostoyevsky.
Strachey observed that Elizabeth’s ultimate beheading of her suitor, Essex, could have been, on one level, a long postponed revenge - of the child/female over the parent/male - for Henry VIII’s beheading of her mother, Anne Boleyn. One can imagine Bacon’s sneer: “Really Sigmund?”
And one doesn’t have to squint very hard to see the Dostoyevsky in Strachey’s portraits of Elizabeth, Essex, and Cecil. Viz, the crafty vacillations of Karamazov pere (Elizabeth), the compulsive, ensnaring, humiliating passions of Dimitri (Essex), and the smooth patient frigid calculations of Ivan (Cecil).
Bacon would deflate Strachey's style easily, for Bacon has said - “Doth any man doubt, that if there were taken out of men's minds, vain opinions, flattering hopes, false valuations, imaginations as one would, and the like, but it would leave the minds, of a number of men, poor shrunken things, full of melancholy and indisposition, and unpleasing to themselves?”
For my vote, I prefer Strachey’s approach to “truth” over Bacon’s - the “diamond by dainty candlelight”, over the “pearl in daylight.” Please, dear psychobiographer, leave in those imaginations, opinions, and flattered hopes!
In fact, by candlelight, other useful truths and correspondences emerge. Case in point, I came to pick up Elizabeth and Essex last week because I was stimulated by the film Anonymous. That film dramatizes the theory that Edward De Vere, Earl of Oxford, wrote Shakespeare’s plays. De Vere chose anonymity over fame, so it goes, to avoid piquing retribution by Elizabeth or her advisors. That he would do so, seems far-fetched until you see the treacherous cross currents made vivid in Elizabeth and Essex,
The chapter regarding the Queen’s physician, Ruy Lopez, shows what could befall even an innocent bystander when ambition and paranoia were inflamed by intrigue. Lopez, a Portugese Jew, by a complicated series of events, became falsely implicated, in a Spanish plot that was in turn, falsed amplified and ultimately alleged to have as its objective the poisoning of the Queen. In return for Lopez’s many years of medical service, he was interrogated by both Cecil and Essex (who were usually rivals), tortured, convicted, and put to death in the following manner - he was castrated, then dis-embowled, and then quartered. (once again, ouch)
In between reading chapters from Essex and Elizabeth, I happened to chance on the BBC series Luther. The series concerns an anti-hero detective in modern London. It’s beautifully written, brilliantly photographed, and seemingly so distant from subject matter of Elizabeth and Essex. And yet, perhaps because of Strachey’s skill in evoking that volatile and criminal time, the 21st century criminal justice workplace, in Luther, seemed an echo to me of the intrigues, the impulsiveness, the moral quirkiness, and the vicious retributive justice of that earlier time - as though some perverse local goddess still haunts the shores of the Thames, and lingers in its miasmas. show less
in Elizabeth and Essex, Strachey holds Bacon in low regard. Essex was a early patron of Bacon, and his loyal, if ineffectual, advocate in matters requiring Elizabeth’s beneficence. That loyalty was ultimately ill paid; Bacon chose to participate in the show more final prosecution of Essex. The Earl’s blunderous attempt at a coup d’etat predictably backfired. But better for Bacon, sub specie aeternitatis, to have abstained from the star chamber rather than take part in Essex’s fore-ordained destruction. Injecting his venom, Strachey labels Bacon’s reversed loyalty “serpentine”, thereby alluding to Bacon’s essay “On Truth, and turning back on the author his own words regarding civil falsehood “For these winding, and crooked courses, are the goings of the serpent; which goeth basely upon the belly, and not upon the feet.”
Bacon, were he allowed to rebut, would likely grind up in his pincers the psychological approach of Strachey to biography, in particular Strachey’s debt to Freud and Dostoyevsky.
Strachey observed that Elizabeth’s ultimate beheading of her suitor, Essex, could have been, on one level, a long postponed revenge - of the child/female over the parent/male - for Henry VIII’s beheading of her mother, Anne Boleyn. One can imagine Bacon’s sneer: “Really Sigmund?”
And one doesn’t have to squint very hard to see the Dostoyevsky in Strachey’s portraits of Elizabeth, Essex, and Cecil. Viz, the crafty vacillations of Karamazov pere (Elizabeth), the compulsive, ensnaring, humiliating passions of Dimitri (Essex), and the smooth patient frigid calculations of Ivan (Cecil).
Bacon would deflate Strachey's style easily, for Bacon has said - “Doth any man doubt, that if there were taken out of men's minds, vain opinions, flattering hopes, false valuations, imaginations as one would, and the like, but it would leave the minds, of a number of men, poor shrunken things, full of melancholy and indisposition, and unpleasing to themselves?”
For my vote, I prefer Strachey’s approach to “truth” over Bacon’s - the “diamond by dainty candlelight”, over the “pearl in daylight.” Please, dear psychobiographer, leave in those imaginations, opinions, and flattered hopes!
In fact, by candlelight, other useful truths and correspondences emerge. Case in point, I came to pick up Elizabeth and Essex last week because I was stimulated by the film Anonymous. That film dramatizes the theory that Edward De Vere, Earl of Oxford, wrote Shakespeare’s plays. De Vere chose anonymity over fame, so it goes, to avoid piquing retribution by Elizabeth or her advisors. That he would do so, seems far-fetched until you see the treacherous cross currents made vivid in Elizabeth and Essex,
The chapter regarding the Queen’s physician, Ruy Lopez, shows what could befall even an innocent bystander when ambition and paranoia were inflamed by intrigue. Lopez, a Portugese Jew, by a complicated series of events, became falsely implicated, in a Spanish plot that was in turn, falsed amplified and ultimately alleged to have as its objective the poisoning of the Queen. In return for Lopez’s many years of medical service, he was interrogated by both Cecil and Essex (who were usually rivals), tortured, convicted, and put to death in the following manner - he was castrated, then dis-embowled, and then quartered. (once again, ouch)
In between reading chapters from Essex and Elizabeth, I happened to chance on the BBC series Luther. The series concerns an anti-hero detective in modern London. It’s beautifully written, brilliantly photographed, and seemingly so distant from subject matter of Elizabeth and Essex. And yet, perhaps because of Strachey’s skill in evoking that volatile and criminal time, the 21st century criminal justice workplace, in Luther, seemed an echo to me of the intrigues, the impulsiveness, the moral quirkiness, and the vicious retributive justice of that earlier time - as though some perverse local goddess still haunts the shores of the Thames, and lingers in its miasmas. show less
A brilliantly iconoclastic book in which a long-haired gay aesthete detonates the great and good of imperial England and the obsequious tradition of Victorian biography/hagiography along with them. The ‘ascetic’ Cardinal Manning is portrayed as a worldly and calculating careerist; Thomas Arnold as an educator who elevated religious indoctrination and ‘character-building’ above actual education; and General Gordon as a reckless, drunken and ultimately self-destructive adventurer. show more Interestingly, as she is the only female in the quartet, Strachey is rather more sympathetic towards Florence Nightingale and clearly on her side in her battles with the male dunderheads of the War Office.
Strachey may have been less than industrious with the research (he did no primary research), sometimes loftily indifferent to mere facts and a dab hand at embroidery in the interests of getting a laugh, but he wrote like an avenging angel and Eminent Victorians is eminently readable. Whatever its strengths and weaknesses as history, it’s straight from the top drawer as a work of literature. Above all, it’s very funny and teeming with great one-liners, sarcastic quips elevated to the level of art and lethal verbal hand-grenades disguised as elegant epigrams.
Strachey was writing against the backdrop of the appalling slaughter of the First World War (he was declared medically unfit but was an outspoken conscientious objector nonetheless) which was, arguably, the logical culmination of all that Victorian deference and veneration of ‘great men.’ Behind the sardonic humour this is a deeply felt work and through layers of irony Strachey wrote from the heart.
In his preface, reacting against the turgid two volume biographies of the time, he asserts that brevity should be the essence of biography. Despite Strachey’s reputation as the founder of modern biography this is one piece of advice many subsequent biographers have chosen to ignore. The idea persists that a definitive biography is possible and, it seems, the longer the biography the more ‘definitive’ it is. The two biographies of recent times I have enjoyed most are relatively concise by the blockbusting standards still prevalent in the genre - Ma’am Darling (99 Glimpses of Princess Margaret) and One Two Three Four: The Beatles in Time. Both are by satirist Craig Brown and possess distinctly Stracheyan qualities of playfulness, formal invention and subversive wit. Like Strachey, Brown is concerned not with imparting new information about his subjects but providing a fresh perspective on a familiar story. He has said that his approach to biography is to leave out the boring bits; Lytton Strachey would undoubtedly have approved. show less
Strachey may have been less than industrious with the research (he did no primary research), sometimes loftily indifferent to mere facts and a dab hand at embroidery in the interests of getting a laugh, but he wrote like an avenging angel and Eminent Victorians is eminently readable. Whatever its strengths and weaknesses as history, it’s straight from the top drawer as a work of literature. Above all, it’s very funny and teeming with great one-liners, sarcastic quips elevated to the level of art and lethal verbal hand-grenades disguised as elegant epigrams.
Strachey was writing against the backdrop of the appalling slaughter of the First World War (he was declared medically unfit but was an outspoken conscientious objector nonetheless) which was, arguably, the logical culmination of all that Victorian deference and veneration of ‘great men.’ Behind the sardonic humour this is a deeply felt work and through layers of irony Strachey wrote from the heart.
In his preface, reacting against the turgid two volume biographies of the time, he asserts that brevity should be the essence of biography. Despite Strachey’s reputation as the founder of modern biography this is one piece of advice many subsequent biographers have chosen to ignore. The idea persists that a definitive biography is possible and, it seems, the longer the biography the more ‘definitive’ it is. The two biographies of recent times I have enjoyed most are relatively concise by the blockbusting standards still prevalent in the genre - Ma’am Darling (99 Glimpses of Princess Margaret) and One Two Three Four: The Beatles in Time. Both are by satirist Craig Brown and possess distinctly Stracheyan qualities of playfulness, formal invention and subversive wit. Like Strachey, Brown is concerned not with imparting new information about his subjects but providing a fresh perspective on a familiar story. He has said that his approach to biography is to leave out the boring bits; Lytton Strachey would undoubtedly have approved. show less
Eminent Victorians is a seminal work of biography that elevated the genre to the status of fine art. The biographical project was liberated by Strachey's humour, iconoclasm, and narrative flair, which replaced veneration with cynicism. For a decade, his images of Cardinal Manning, Florence Nightingale, Thomas Arnold, and General Gordon transformed people's conceptions of Victorians.
When Lytton Strachey's biographical articles on four "great Victorians" were published in 1918, they sent a show more shockwave through Victorian England. It was the beginning of the modern biography, elevating the genre to the status of high literary art. Strachey used his iconoclastic wit and cynicism to approach his themes rather than devotion. show less
When Lytton Strachey's biographical articles on four "great Victorians" were published in 1918, they sent a show more shockwave through Victorian England. It was the beginning of the modern biography, elevating the genre to the status of high literary art. Strachey used his iconoclastic wit and cynicism to approach his themes rather than devotion. show less
Eminent Victorians: Cardinal Manning, Florence Nightingale, Dr. Arnold, General Gordon (Classic Reprint) by Lytton Strachey
I read "Eminent Victorians" a few years ago, but I don't think I understood why it was considered an interesting or notable history. After this rereading, I think I might get it. It's not the biographical data it contains that makes it important: it's bibliography isn't exactly extensive, and, while Florence Nightingale is likely to be the only figure here that is still familiar to modern readers, all four of its subjects were extremely famous in their own day. In witty, strategically show more understated prose, Strachey argues that these four personages owed a great deal of their success to less-than-admirable character traits: a superficial morality that masked powerful ambitions, a constant tension between self-promotion and self-abnegation, a talent for organization and bureaucratic maneuvering, and an overweening self-confidence and, sometimes, an astonishing disregard for facts. I was, for example, amazed to learn that for all the work she did in sanitation and medical training, Ms. Nightingale wasn't convinced by Pasteur's germ theory. It should probably be noted that Strachey might have been writing with an agenda in mind; he belonged to a social set that sought to unmask what they saw as Victorian hypocrisy. Still, the portraits he presents here are largely convincing. He seems to have a talent for isolating the most revealing bits of the mountains of personal memoranda and personal docuementation that each of his subjects left behind. In any event, his book still serves as a valuable historical document: reading the self-lacerating diary entries of the thinkers involved in the Oxford Movement, or bits of General Gordon's manic, messianic account of the siege of Khartoum might tell you more about the Victorian mindset than an armful of Trollope. Especially recommended to those with a special interest in the Victorian period or in the Modernists who sought to overcome their Victorian origins and seek a new path. show less
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- 45
- Also by
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- Rating
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- ISBNs
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