Lytton Strachey

Lytton Strachey,1931

Giles Lytton Strachey (March 1 1880 – January 21 1932) was a British writer and critic. He is best known for establishing a new form of biography in which psychological insight and sympathy are combined with irreverence and wit.

Life

Strachey was born in London, the son of Lady (Jane) Strachey, a leading supporter of the women's suffrage movement, and Sir Richard Strachey, an engineer. He was the 11th of 13 children, 10 of whom survived to adulthood, including his sister Dorothy Strachey. From 1899 to 1905, he studied at Trinity College, Cambridge, having previously read history at the University of Liverpool. His membership in the "Apostles" Society while at Cambridge led him to form friendships with people such as the philosopher G.E. Moore, John Maynard Keynes and Leonard Woolf; at Cambridge he also became close friends with non-Apostles Thoby Stephen and Clive Bell, and they, together with sisters Vanessa and Virginia Stephen (later Woolf) eventually formed the intellectually-centered Bloomsbury group. From 1904 to 1914 he contributed book and drama reviews to The Spectator magazine, published poetry, and wrote an important work of literary criticism, Landmarks in French Literature (1912). During World War I, he was a conscientious objector, and spent much time with like-minded people such as Lady Ottoline Morrell and the "Bloomsberries". His first great success, and his most famous achievement, was Eminent Victorians (1918), a collection of four short biographies of Victorian heroes. With a dry wit, he exposed the human failings of his subjects and what he saw as the hypocrisy at the centre of Victorian morality. This work was followed in the same style by Queen Victoria (1921). He died of (then undiagnosed) stomach cancer at age 51 at his country house near Hungerford in Berkshire.

Though Strachey spoke openly about his homosexuality with his Bloomsbury friends, it was not publicly revealed until (1967-8), in a biography by Michael Holroyd. His unusual relationship with the painter Dora Carrington (she loved him, but Strachey was much more interested in her husband Ralph Partridge, as well as various other young men) was portrayed in the film Carrington (1995). A couplet from the period describes their unusual relationship: "Lytton Strachey was gay, Dora was bisexual/Life is strange when you're an intellectual." Jonathan Pryce won Best Actor at the Cannes Film Festival for his performance as Strachey in this film. Strachey's letters, edited by Paul Levy, were published in 2005.

Books

Landmarks in French Literature (1912)
Eminent Victorians: Cardinal Manning, Florence Nightingale, Dr. Arnold, General Gordon (1918)
Queen Victoria (1921)
Books and Characters (1922)
Elizabeth and Essex: A Tragic History (1928)
Portraits in Miniature and Other Essays (1931)
Characters and Commentaries (ed. James Strachey, 1933)
Spectatorial Essays (ed. James Strachey, 1964)
Ermyntrude and Esmeralda (1969)
Lytton Strachey by Himself: A Self Portrait (ed. Michael Holroyd, 1971)
The Really Interesting Question and Other Papers (ed. Paul Levy, 1972)
The Shorter Strachey (ed. Michael Holroyd and Paul Levy, 1980)
The Letters of Lytton Strachey (ed. Paul Levy, 2005) ISBN 0-670-89112-6

Verse

Ely: an Ode (written at Trinity College)

References

"Lytton Strachey", Michael Holroyd 1994, ISBN 0-09-933291-4 (paperback)
'Lytton Strachey: The Art of Biography', Desmond MacCarthy. "Sunday Times" Nov. 5, 1933: 8.
"Lytton Strachey: his mind and art," Charles Richard Sanders. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957.
"The Psychological Milieu of Lytton Strachey",Martin Kallich. NY: Bookman Associates, 1961.
'Nabokov and Strachey.'G.Diment. "Comparative Literature Studies" 27.4 (1990): 285-97.
"Lytton Strachey", John Ferns. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1988.
'Holroyd/Strachey/Shaw: Art and Archives in Literary Biography,' Harold Fromm. "The Hudson Review", 42.2 (1989): 201-221.
'Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians', Millicent Bell. "The Biographer’s Art", ed. Jeffrey Meyers. London: Macmillan Press, 1989, 53-55.
'Lytton Strachey’s Elegant, Energetic Character Assassinations Destroyed for Ever the Pretensions of the Victorian Age to Moral Supremacy,'Roy Hattersley. "New Statesman" Aug. 12, 2002.

External links

Works by Lytton Strachey at Project Gutenberg
Lincoln Allison (Reader in Politics, University of Warwick) Colourful Eminence - Lytton Strachey's Eminent Victorians: a Retrospective Review Social Affairs Unit Web Review, July 2005