Lytton
Strachey
born March 1, 1880, London
died Jan. 21, 1932, Ham Spray House, near
Hungerford, Berkshire, Eng.
English biographer and critic who opened
a new era of biographical writing at the
close of World War I. Adopting an irreverent
attitude to the past and especially to the
monumental life-and-letters volumes of
Victorian biography, Strachey proposed to
write lives with “a brevity which excludes
everything that is redundant and nothing
that is significant.” He is best known for
Eminent Victorians—short sketches of the
Victorian idols Cardinal Manning, Florence
Nightingale, Thomas Arnold, and Gen. Charles
“Chinese” Gordon.
After studying at Cambridge (1899–1903),
Strachey lived in London, where he became a
leader in the artistic, intellectual, and
literary Bloomsbury group. He published
critical writings, especially on French
literature, but his greatest achievement was
in biography. After Eminent Victorians
(1918) and Queen Victoria (1921), he wrote
Elizabeth and Essex (1928) and Portraits in
Miniature (1931). Treating his subjects from
a highly idiosyncratic point of view, he was
fascinated by personality and motive and
delighted in pricking the pretensions of the
great and reducing them to somewhat less
than life-size. His aim was to paint a
portrait; and though this led to caricature
and sometimes, through tendentious selection
of material, to inaccuracy, he taught
biographers a sense of form and of
background, and he sharpened their critical
acumen.
His defects as a biographer arose mainly
from his limited vision of life. He saw
politics largely as intrigue, religion as a
ludicrous anachronism, and personal
relations as life’s supremely important
facet. Though bitterly attacked during his
lifetime and after, Strachey remains a
phenomenon in English letters and a
preeminent humorist and wit.
