"Eminent Victorians" is a seminal work of biography and social commentary published by British writer and critic Lytton Strachey. By offering four unique portrayals of notable Victorian people, the book challenges the standard approach to biography. Cardinal Manning, Florence Nightingale, Dr. Thomas Arnold, and General Charles Gordon are among Strachey's subjects. Strachey takes a sarcastic and critical perspective to their lives, rather than offering hagiographic narratives. He examines their shortcomings, paradoxes, and character complexity, presenting the human side of these great figures. Strachey's style is funny and astute, providing readers with a new perspective on these great figures. When it was initially released, the book's satirical tone and unorthodox biographical format generated quite a stir. Strachey's presentation of these illustrious Victorians as flawed and deficient questioned the conventional veneration for the era's heroes and heroines. "Eminent Victorians" is more than just a biography compilation; it's a critique of the Victorian society and beliefs that these figures embodied. Strachey's work was influential in altering the biography genre and encouraging a more nuanced and critical assessment of historical characters.

Lytton Strachey's acclaimed portrayal of Queen Victoria revolutionised the art of biography by using elements of romantic fiction and melodrama to create a warm, humorous and very human portrait of this iconic figure. We see Victoria as a strong-willed child with a famous temper, as the 18-year-old girl queen, as a monarch, wife, mother and widow. Equally fascinating are the depictions of her relationships: with her governess "precious Lehzen", with Peel, Gladstone and Disraeli, with her beloved Albert and, in later life, her legendary devotion to her Highland servant John Brown.

While working on his two-volume biography of Lytton Strachey, Michael Holroyd had access to the Strachey archives. From the same source he collected all Strachey's diaries and memoirs, which together in this volume form an intermittent but not disconnected autobiography. From childhood diaries to the introspective and often anguished records of late adolescence emerges an intimate self-portrait, valuable for its own sake and also for the light it sheds on the most gifted members of the Bloomsbury Group. In addition to the informal diaries, Strachey wrote and read to the Memoir Club two autobiographical essays (also published here) which may be judged among the finest and most characteristic of his writing.

"A triumphant success. . . . His prose is confident, clear . . . occasionally perfect." Dennis Potter, "The Times" (London)

Lytton Strachey (1880 - 1932) is one of the key figures in the cultural life of twentieth century Britain, and his letters are a literary treasure - trove of the man and his world, as well as a record of the startling and poignant love - affair, between him and the painter Dora Carrington. The breadth of his correspondence is breathtaking, going from precocious childhood letters, to letters to Leonard and Virginia Woolf, Maynard Keynes and other members of the Bloomsbury Group to love letters to Duncan Grant and Carrington. The thousands of letters he wrote retain their vitality to this day discussing changes in morals, the writing of history, literature and philosophy, politics, war and peace and the advent of modernism. As an historian and biographer, he was largely responsible for our own view that the Victorians were priggish; he was openly homosexual living in a menage a trois with Ralph Partridge and Carrington.

Examine Lytton Strachey’s struggle to create a new homosexual identity and voice through his life and work! This study of Lytton Strachey, one of the neglected voices of early twentieth-century England, uses his life and work to re-evaluate early British modernism and the relationship between Strachey’s sexual rebellion and literature. A perfect ancillary textbook for courses in history, literature, and women’s studies, Lytton Strachey and the Search for Modern Sexual Identity: The Last Eminent Victorian contributes to the expanding field of queer studies from an historian’s perspective. It looks at homosexuality through the eyes of Lytton Strachey as opposed to the too-often analyzed Oscar Wilde and E.M. Forster. Questioning the idea that homosexuality is a “transgressive rebellion,” as Strachey as well as scholars on Bloomsbury have insisted, this volume focuses on the ongoing conflict between Strachey’s Victorian notions of class, gender, and race, and his desire to be modern. Linking Strachey’s life and work to the larger movement of English modernism, Lytton Strachey and the Search for Modern Sexual Identity examines: Strachey’s role at Cambridge before World War I how he created his version of homosexuality out of the Victorian tradition of male romantic friendship his relations with the British Empire as he constructed a rich fantasy life that rested on racial and class differences his friendships and rivalries with the women of Bloomsbury how Strachey’s use of sexuality, androgyny, and history defined (and undermined) his brand of modernism This thoughtfully indexed, well-referenced volume looks at Strachey’s life, in the words of author Julie Anne Taddeo, “to illustrate some of the issues concerning his generation of Cambridge and Bloomsbury colleagues and how they battled the Victorian ideology, often without success.” It is an essential read for everyone interested in this fascinating chapter in literary (and queer) history.