.com Review
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The four biographical essays that make up Eminent
Victorians created something of a stir when they were first
published in the spring of 1918, bringing their author instant
fame. In his flamboyant collection, Lytton Strachey chose to
stray far from the traditional mode of biography: "Those two
volumes, with which it is our custom to commemorate the dead--who
does not know them, with their ill-digested masses of material,
their slipshod style, their tone of tedious panegyric, their
lamentable lack of selection, of detachment, of design?" Instead
he provided impressionistic but acute (and, some said, skewed)
portraits. Rarely does Strachey explore the details of a
subject's daily or family life unless they point directly to an
issue of character. In short, he pioneered a deeply sardonic and
often scathingly funny biographical style.
None of Strachey's Victorians emerge unscathed. In his hands,
Florence Nightingale is not a gentle archangel descended from
heaven to minister sweetly to wounded soldiers, but rather an
exacting, dictatorial, and judgmental crusader. Her "pen, in the
virulence of its volubility, would rush ... to the denunciation
of an incompetent surgeon or the ridicule of a self-sufficient
nurse. Her sarcasm searched the ranks of the officials with the
deadly and unsparing precision of a machine-. Her nicknames
were terrible. She respected no one." Dr. Thomas Arnold, the man
appointed to revamp the very private British public school
system, fares little better: in Strachey's ink, he became
"the founder of the worship of athletics and the worship of good
form." In this same vain, hero General Gordon is
portrayed as a temperamental, irascible hermit, occasionally
drunk and often found in the company of young boys--a man who
tended to forget and forgo the tenets found in the Bible he kept
with him always. And the powerful and popular Cardinal Manning,
who came within a hair's breadth of succeeding Pope Pius IX,
belonged, Strachey writes, "to that class of eminent
ecclesiastics ... who have been distinguished less for
saintliness and learning than for practical ability."
As he offered up indelible sketches of his less-than-fab four,
Strachey was intent on critiquing established mores. This
effortlessly superior wit knew full well that deep convictions
and good deeds often go hand in hand with hypocrisy, arrogance,
and egomania. His task was to pique those who pretended they did
not. --Jordana Moskowitz
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Review
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Collection of short biographical sketches by Lytton
Strachey, published in 1918. Strachey's portraits of Cardinal
Manning, Florence Nightingale, Thomas Arnold, and General Charles
"Chinese" Gordon revolutionized English biography. Until
Strachey, biographers had kept an awestruck distance from their
subjects; anything short of adulation was regarded as disrespect.
Strachey, however, announced that he would write lives with "a
brevity which excludes everything that is redundant and nothing
that is significant," whether flattering to the subject or not.
His intensely personal sketches scandalized stuffier readers but
delighted many literati. Strachey's impressionistic portraits
occasionally led to inaccuracy, since he selected the facts he
liked and had little use for politics or religion. By portraying
his "Eminent Victorians" as multifaceted, flawed human beings
rather than idols, and by informing public knowledge with private
information, Strachey ushered in a new era of biography. -- The
Merriam-Webster Encyclopedia of Literature (
/exec/obidos/isbn=0877790426/%24%7B0%7D )
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About the Author
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Lytton Strachey, whose iconoclastic reexaminations
of historical figures forever changed the course of modern
biographical writing, was born in London on March 1, 1880. He was
educated in a series of private schools and attended University
College, Liverpool, before entering Trinity College, Cambridge,
in 1899. In London he found work as an essayist for various
journals and became the drama critic for The Spectator. The
favorable reception of his first book, Landmarks in French
Literature (1912), bolstered his commitment to writing. Virginia
Woolf said: "The figure of Lytton Strachey is so important a
figure in the history of biography that it compels a pause. For
his three famous books, Eminent Victorians, Queen Victoria, and
Elizabeth and Essex, are of a stature to show both what biography
can do and what biography cannot do. . . . The anger and the
interest that his short studies of Eminent Victorians aroused
showed that he was able to make Manning, Florence Nightingale,
Gordon, and the rest live as they had not lived since they were
actually in the . . . . In the lives of the two great
Queens, Elizabeth and Victoria, he attempted a far more ambitious
task. Biography had never had a fairer chance of showing what it
could do. For it was now being put to the test by a writer who
was capable of making use of all the liberties that biography had
won."
Michael Holroyd has written accled biographies of Ellen Terry
and Henry Irving, Augustus John, George Bernard Shaw, and Lytton
Strachey as well as two memoirs, Basil Street Blues, and Mosaic.
Holroyd is the president emeritus of the Royal Society of
Literature, knighted for his services to literature and the only
nonfiction writer to have received the David Cohen British Prize
for Literature. His book, A Strange Eventful History, won the
James Tait Black Memorial Prize for biography in 2009. He lives
in London with his wife, the novelist Margaret Drabble.
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