I had never really known much about Lytton Strachey before reading Taddeo's book. I ordered this on a whim and loved it---I've just ordered Strachey's Eminent Victorians after reading this.

Taddeo writes really well---the book moves quickly and I was fascinated by Taddeo's analysis and discussion of Strachey's sexuality. What I liked most about this book (and I can't say this enough!) was its readability. This is a book for scholars and non-specialists.

If you've read any of the books by the Bloomsbury group or if you love the Victorians, buy this book (actually you should buy it and read it no matter what!).

Lytton Strachey, a member of the Bloomsbury group, altered the way biographies were written with this volume of four well-known Victorians. At the time the book was published, it skewered the hypocrisies and self-assured nature of the Victorians. Even today, when we are so far removed from the Victorian age that it seems quaint and even attractive, this book's attack on the deadening effect of much of that time still rings true. And it is as readable now as it was then; Strachey was one of the wittiest men of his time, and this book is his most successful work. Interestingly, he became less iconoclastic as he grew older, and his later biography of Queen Victoria (not one of the four figures contained in Eminent Victorians) is rather respectful. If you enjoy this book (and almost anyone would), you might want to try to see the movie released several years ago titled "Carrington." It is based on a biography of Strachey by Milchael Holroyd, but is told from the point of view of a woman who fell hopelessly in love with Strachey; unfortunately for her, he was a confirmed homosexual, but she loved him anyway. Emma Thompson plays the title roal and Jonathan Pryce is an excellent Strachey.

Most of us here in the old "colony" have probably never heard of General Gordon. For Brits, he's a legendary eccentric military man of the late 1800's who died a hero in terrible circumstances.(At least that's what I think many Brits think..) After a brilliant career in many parts of the vast Empire, and beyond, Gen Gordon was sent to control some Islamic revolutionary jihadist types (sound familiar) led by a charismatic Mahdi (messiah). By all accounts the general was a man worthy of this assignment, and brought his small force to Khartoum to free the slaves, and rally the locals...The rest is bizarre and insane in the extreme with the good general suffering breakdowns of sorts, including having dinner with some rodent friends...When word gets to London, after political maneuvering and bickering, the people damand an expeditionary force to save Gordon and his men.Too late!! A great tragedy ensues. If there's a better short bio out there than this one, I'd read it ASAP...Florence Nightingale has a great story too, and her experiences show once again the horrors of war (this time the earlier Crimean one), and indifference of the comfortable few sitting at home by the fireplace in willful ignorance. No doubt she was a force to be reckoned with, and her ideas about clean hospitals and nursing helped change the world...This book is recommended to those looking for a different historical perspective on current events, and for nurse everywhere! The other two bios are good, but may be put aside for later.

The most famous anecdote about this book (and the one that made me aware of it) is the scene of Bertrand Russell in his prison cell incarcerated for his Pacifism during WWI laughing hysterically while reading the work. (And being henceforth rebuked by a guard for doing so in what was, after all, a penal institution.)-The other reviewers are pretty much on the mark in that Strachey set a new standard for biography.-But the piece on General Gordon surpasses all. I can see myself on death row laughing over this section.-It is in part a sad reflection on what years in the Sudan can do to an orthodox Englishman's mind. It is indeed uncanny to hear Gordon aver, on his famous expedition to save Khartoum, nearly the exact words of Baudelaire as he gazed across the perhaps too familiar desert landscape:"It is necessary to be drunken always. This is everything. This is the unique question." (my translation)-This is the aged General the sober English sent on this perilous quest. This is the man who daily battled with the question of what God's Will was for him.-What the Gordon section and the others show, of course, is that man (or woman) is not one-dimensional. Far more often, he(she)is multi-dimensional to the point of being paradoxical. The hypocritical Victorian mindset was pushed over the edge by this book.

This life of Queen Victoria set a new standard for biographies when it was written and it still reads very well today. To the modern ear some of Strachey's language may at times be a bit dry. That aside this is an excellent study of the development of Victoria from infancy to old age. The entanglement's of family and the influence of key ministers is well covered and documented . Especially interesting is the treatment of Prince Albert and the Queen's relationship.
I found this to be quite an informative book and would highly recommend it to anyone with a curiosity regarding this period of British history.

I purchased this book at a library sale and it has no copywrit date other then the 1921 date published by Harcourt, Grace & World,Inc and renewed by Jame Strachey, with no renewal date. The copy I have has 434 pages which include an index of subject matter. The only other used books mentioned for sale have a copywrit of 1981 and have 100 less pages. This book is in very good condition and has the original cover jacket. It begins its historic tale in 1817 and includes footnotes at the bottom of the page.

strachey became famous for his 'eminent victorians' which has the reputation for being a hatchet job-but he was looking at the previous generation from the disillusioned, post-WWI perspective, and he treats florence nightingale et al more like prodigies than monsters. when he undertook to write about the eponymous queen herself, people expected it would be another exercise in target practice-even his mother tried to discourage him, saying that 'if she was stupid, it was not her fault.' But in the event what he produced is one of the most sympathetic, if slightly condescending, biographies ever written-and absolutely one of the most accomplished. it is a chronicle of victoria's 60+-year-long political career and emotional life, a series of portraits of all the personalities in her life-including albert, his curious replacement john brown, disraeli-him, it is true, strachey clearly did not like-a completely non-pedantic reflection on the growth and eventual shrinkage of the british empire during her reign-and the whole thing is done so subtly, so gracefully-and, at the same time, so forcefully-that you may find yourself talking about nothing else but this book and queen victoria for days afterward. one of the most successful marriages of rigorous scholarship and beautiful style in english literature.

Elizabeth and Essex is perhaps the finest example of Strachey's incomparable style. More poetic than prosaic, ripe with imagery and atmosphere, Strachey's elegant, vigorous prose is a treat to read.

This is all the more unusual given that Strachey is a historian. In most cases, his style doesn't get in the way of the story; his subjects are usually represented accurately and with respect.

Unfortunately, he doesn't quite succeed in this case. Strachey's Victorian sensibilities and Freudian view of his subjects often take him on wild flights of fancy that fail the test of Occam's razor. For instance, he asserts that Elizabeth was sexually disorganized based on a smattering of rumours which, he claims, prove that she had a deep-seated fear of sex and perhaps a hysterical block which prevented her from engaging in intercourse. Pretty convoluted reasoning, especially considering the fact that Elizabeth had perfectly sound political reasons to remain single.

Strachey's portrait of Essex is likewise suspect. He turns the proud scion of an ancient family into a manic-depressive basket case, but his evidence for this is scanty and his reasoning difficult to follow. Again, is it really likely that Essex plotted to overthrow the government because he saw himself as the true King of England, when a much more simple explanation (he was angry and felt insulted) comes to mind?

Yet even through the flights of psychological fancy and the wildly improbable motives, Strachey's portrait continues to enchant. I cannot stress strongly enough how enjoyable and entertaining this book is. Yes, one does have to take Strachey's explanations with a grain of salt, but the journey itself is a lot of fun and should not be missed.

I highly recommend this book.

If you are interested in the personal details of the latter half of Queen Elizabeth's life, this is an excellent book to read. Her wars and reconciliations with the headstrong Lord Essex (many years her junior) are covered in just the right level of detail, so that the reader is never gorged on nor starved for insights into what made Gloriana such a remarkable figure. Strachey's first chapter gives a particularly adept placement of the Queen's personality within the court of England and the field of late-16th century Europe. Following chapters contain less politics and more humanity. (The slow, initially frustrated but inevitable rise of Francis Bacon's star is interesting.)

It is indeed a courageous undertaking to write the biography of the man who reinvented the genre. But, going by all the praise lavished on his life of Lytton Strachey, Holroyd has succeeded. And surely he cannot be faulted for his style of writing, which is lively, expressive, subtly humorous, and makes inventive use of metaphor. And yet, and yet... I became interested in Strachey not so much through reading his "Queen Victoria" which, frankly, I found rather boring and surprisingly humourless; but after seeing the movie "Carrington", based on Holroyds biography; - and much as I hate to say this, I liked the movie better.
The main problem simply is that Strachey's life was too uneventful to command attention for nearly 700 pages. What you end up with is this image of an old-maidish, pampered, and astonishingly self-centred man forever reading books in the aloofness of his country cottage while unaccountably being the object of universal adoration. The final and supposedly climactic love-affair with Roger Senhouse might have provided some eleventh-hour excitement, but honestly doesn't amount to more than the cliché of the unattractive (but intelligent, rich and famous) middle aged man infatuated with the vapid, reluctant and opportunistic (but very pretty) much younger man.
Surely Holroyd is a bit to blame as well for not gaining full hold of our (well, at least my) attention. Here we have The Apostles and the "Bloomsberries" in their heyday, with Diaghilev, Nijinsky and the likes casually thrown in as well. An incredible collection of brilliant and colourful people; and yet all they seem to occupy themselves with is bourgeois bickerings, common gossip, parties, parties, parties, and amorous obsessions of a peculiarly puerile nature. Where is all the wit and dazzling conversation that is frequently reported by Holroyd, but rarely demonstrated? We're told about a lot of people and things, but they remain abstractions. Even a character as bizarre as Ottoline Morrell remains a mere cipher. The frequent trips to France and Spain read like depersonalised itenaries from a travel agent's brochure, and we are kept in the dark about their meaning in Lytton's life.
Unfortunately Holroyd reverts to an overdose of Freudian psycho-analytical blabla to lend depth to his characters. This largely obsolete approach to psychology remains a staple of biographers, probably because it offers such metaphorically appealing instant explanations of all relational problems and personal obsessions. Seeing rather too much of Mama lately? - hello Oedipus! Such off-the-peg explanations add very little to our understanding of the person. Actually I didn't find this book all too insightful psychologically speaking. E.g., the bouts of anxiety and depression that troubled Carrington in her final years pop up out of nowhere as a rather too hasty prelude to her suicide. Her complicated relationship with Strachey is underplayed, so that at times she emerges more like a luxury housekeeper with a talent for painting than as Strachey's ticket to survival. For clearly it was she alone who saved him from utter and desparate loneliness (as well as he her). Gretchen Gerzina's biography of Carrington, in all its compactness, is much closer to the essence and tragedy of both Carrington's and Lytton's personalities, and the peculiar chemistry between them, it seems to me.
Another strange thing is that we get to know just about nothing about Strachey's sexual pursuits. Now call me unhealthily curious if you like, but Lytton himself was known to speak disparagingly of Virginia Woolf's books because of their 'lack of copulation'. So where is his own? How can you write 700 pages about one of the most notable and visible homosexuals in England at the time, and yet in the end leave the reader uncertain whether the man ever had any sexual contacts with anyone at all???
And the other, more troubling question that remains in the end is: why would this man deserve so much attention? His lasting output amounts to no more than three books. And Strachey may have thought Forster (another spectre relegated to the sidelines by Holroyd) a dreary 'old maid' (projection, the dedicated Freudian might wonder?), but himself certainly never mustered the courage or conviction to write something like "Maurice", let alone anything else approaching Forster's novelistic output! And output aside, Marie-Jacqueline Lancaster has shown in her collectors-item biography of Brian Howard, who was in many ways Strachey's extroverted counterpart, that you can even write a fascinating book about somebody who produced literally nothing at all of worth during his lifetime (could somebody please reprint this book!). Starting on Holroyds book I expected a classic like Furbank's Forster or Ellman's Wilde. Alas, it wasn't so; which is partly due to the fact that Strachey was simply a more superficial and less tragic or extravagant figure than either of these; and partly to the fact that Holroyd fails to make the most of the brilliant company he associated with.

I remember when I first saw this immense book that Lytton Strachey must be a person of some importance. As I had at that point never heard of Lytton I was surprised that a person of such importance had escaped my notice. It was then that I discovered one of the important things in understanding books. The size is often related to the amount of material available rather than the importance of the person.

Lytton Strachey was an English writer in the interwar period. He wrote a number of histories including a biography of Queen Victoria and another work called Eminent Victorians. At the time it was published Eminent Victorians was seen as a savage attack on the reputation of a number of English heroes. Nowadays it seen as an affectionate but realistic portrait of a number of figures who were previously given mythical status.

The biography of Strachey is really a biography of the Bloomsbury Group. Keynes, Virginia Wolf and the others who lived or met around the London Suburb of Bloomsbury. It tells of their affairs, the ups and downs of their lives and how they interconnected.

The portrait of Strachey is a gentle and affectionate one. Strachey was a person who was gay. He married Carrington a woman who became a minor artist. Their relationship has been turned into a recent film.

The book is quite long but it is the portrait of an England that is long since gone. A description of a number of people who were once at the centre of their nations cultural life. It is a book that is gently endearing.

Lytton Strachey was one of the key figures in the Bloomsbury group, and one of Virginia Wolf's best friends. He is best known today for his portraits of four famous Victorians in "Emminent Victorians." At the time, the book was something of piece of generational warfare; the figures that Strachey dismantles were models of piety and determination held up to Strachey's generation when they were young as the sort of people to emulate. Strachey, who was one of the wittiest men of his time, shows that actually they were something of narrowminded fanatics.

Holroyd's biography is a superb portrait of Strachey and the circle he moved in. Well-documented, it brings to life many people never well-known in America. Strachey's personal life was extremely complicated; a woman named Carrington (she refused to use her first name which was Dora) fell desparately in love with him. This was unfortunate for her because Strachey was a confirmed homosexual. When examined for possible conscription during the First World War, he was asked what he would due if he saw a German trying to rape his sister; his response was "I should try to come between them." This made no difference to Carrington, whose love for him was so great that she committed suicide after his death. Carrington, and other figures who became involved in Strachey's complicated life make this almost a group biography. In fact, the biography was rereleased in connection with the movie "Carrington" (starred Emma Thompson in the title role and Jonathan Pryce as Strachey) and on the cover Carrington's name is in type as big as that used for Lytton Strachey. Holroyd's writing style is fluid, and his eye for a tellng anecdote make the biography eminently readable. One does not have to be obsessed with Bloomsbury to enjoy this book.

This book was sloppily produced. Typographical errors permeate. There are distracting mistakes in some of the captions, too, such as that for a picture of a gray bearded, corpulent Prince of Wales supposedly taken in 1863 when he would have been a man in his early twenties (p. 205). The author -- and his subject -- deserve much better. The publisher deserves a spanking.

This book is a "must have" for anyone interested in royalty or history in general. It's a lovely book in a scaled down coffee table format.

Rather than upon this somewhat loose and insubstantial collection of biographical sketches, Strachey's fame rests upon his quartet of long essays, Eminent Victorians. One can see why. Strachey was an ironist of Wildean pretensions, and in this book he writes too frequently of subjects with whom he is in obvious sympathy - a largely eighteenth-century assembly of essayists, biographers and letter-writers. Thus, whilst always appreciative of the eccentric or the absurd, Strachey too frequently floats off into vapid sentimentality (the dangerous obverse of irony - as Wilde also knew). As a historian Strachey was a recycler rather than a pioneer of information - with the result that the value of his books depends wholly upon their style; and, deprived of its ironic edge, the style comes across as merely well-groomed. As rarified as the French high culture he repeatedly dwells on, Strachey's writing here seems either frigid or simply decorous - with the exception of one paragraph towards the end of the book in which he is galvanised into a superb digression on the vulgarity of English Victorianism. To quote it here would be to remove the main reason for buying this otherwise tame, uninformative, effete and impeccably-written book.