Picture of author.

Lytton Strachey (1880–1932)

Autor(a) de Eminent Victorians

39+ Works 4,074 Membros 57 Críticas 5 Favorited

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
Image credit: from Wikipedia Commons

Obras por Lytton Strachey

Eminent Victorians (1918) 1,761 exemplares
Queen Victoria (1921) 938 exemplares
The Letters of Lytton Strachey (2005) 121 exemplares
Landmarks in French Literature (1912) 55 exemplares
Biographical Essays (1948) 54 exemplares
The Shorter Strachey (1980) 54 exemplares
Literary Essays (1949) 54 exemplares
Ermyntrude and Esmeralda (1969) 46 exemplares

Associated Works

Etiquetado

Conhecimento Comum

Nome canónico
Strachey, Lytton
Nome legal
Strachey, Giles Lytton
Data de nascimento
1880-03-01
Data de falecimento
1932-01-21
Localização do túmulo
St. Andrew's Churchyard, Chew Magna, Bath and North East Somerset Unitary Authority, Somerset, England, UK
Sexo
male
Nacionalidade
UK
Local de nascimento
Clapham, London, England, UK
Local de falecimento
Ham, Wiltshire, England, UK
Causa da morte
stomach cancer
Locais de residência
London, England, UK
Ham Spray, Wiltshire, England, UK
Educação
Trinity College, University of Cambridge (BA|1903)
University of Liverpool
North Leamington School
Ocupações
biographer
critic
essayist
historian
Relações
Strachey, Dorothy (sister)
Strachey, James (brother)
Carrington, Dora (partner)
Strachey, Marjorie (sister)
Strachey, Julia (niece)
Strachey, Barbara (niece) (mostrar todos 8)
Strachey, Alix (sister-in-law)
Strachey, Ray (sister-in-law)
Organizações
Bloomsbury Group
Cambridge Apostles
The Midnight Society
Prémios e menções honrosas
Royal Society of Literature Benson Medal
Chancellor's Medal (Trinity College)

Fatal error: Call to undefined function isLitsy() in /var/www/html/inc_magicDB.php on line 425
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.

Membros

Críticas

So many great biobraphies owe their lineage to Lytton Strachey's classic Eminent Victorians, the original de-bunking biography.
 
Assinalado
MylesKesten | 31 outras críticas | Jan 23, 2024 |
Strachey was a masterful prose stylist, and everything you've heard about this fascinating portrait of four representative figures of Victorian England broke new ground in biographical method. Strachey moved away from mammoth hagiographies to quick--but thorough--critical essays on his subjects, Highly recommended.
 
Assinalado
Mark_Feltskog | 31 outras críticas | Dec 23, 2023 |
I picked this up at a Little Free Library because I knew the author name in a vague sense and Victorians are definitely in my wheelhouse. I wasn't quite sure what to expect and I'm still not sure now I have finished it. It started with the quite long and fairly involved biography of the totally unknown to me Cardinal Manning, a British Roman Catholic, with much on the Oxford Movement. Each bio got a little shorter but they did all seem to knit together in a strange way. I learned much more about the Victorian period and people I knew little to nothing about and it gave me things to look at and learn about going forward. So, it was a good read in that way. Lytton Strachey has a fairly barbed wit but I enjoyed it.… (mais)
 
Assinalado
amyem58 | 31 outras críticas | Oct 9, 2023 |
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. 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.
… (mais)
 
Assinalado
gpower61 | 31 outras críticas | Jul 4, 2023 |

Listas

Prémios

You May Also Like

Associated Authors

Estatísticas

Obras
39
Also by
3
Membros
4,074
Popularidade
#6,178
Avaliação
3.8
Críticas
57
ISBN
310
Línguas
11
Marcado como favorito
5

Tabelas & Gráficos