Lytton strachey
Lytton stracheyLytton Strachey, English biographer, was born in 1880. He was an openly gay member of the artistically talented Bloomsbury Group, centering on Leonard and Virginia Woolf. (Strachey had once proposed to Virginia n�e Stephen, but she laughed. When he was conscripted in World War I, he declared himself to be a pacifist. When the board asked what he would do if a Hun were raping his sister, he said that he would try to interpose his body.) See the film Carrington to receive an interesting picture of Strachey. His biography Eminent Victorians was the first major anti-Victorian iconoclastic work.
He was a writer, but yet to publish Eminent Victorians' -an iconoclastic set of satirical biographical essays which would make his name; and his friends considered him the most brilliant of them all. He was also homosexual.
The Merriam-Webster Encyclopedia of Literature
Collection of short biographical sketches by Lytton Strachey, published in 1918. Strachey's portraits of Cardinal Manning, Florence Nightingale, Thomas Arnold, and General Charles "Chinese" Gordon revolutionized English biography. Until Strachey, biographers had kept awestruck distance from their subjects; anything short of adulation was regarded as disrespect Strachey, however, announced that he would write lives with "a brevity which excludes everything that is redundant and nothing that is significant," whether flattering to the subject or not. His intensely personal sketches scandalized stuffier readers but delighted many literati. Strachey's impressionistic portraits occasionally led to inaccuracy, since he selected the facts he liked and had little use for politics or religion. By portraying his "Eminent Victorians" as multifaceted, flawed human beings rather than idols, and by informing public knowledge with private information, Strachey ushered in a new era of biography.
Quote
Ignorance is the first requisite of the historian -- ignorance, which simplifies and clarifies, which selects and omits, with a placid perfection unattainable by the highest art.
Strachey, Giles Lytton (1880-1932), English essayist and biographer; a profound analyst who clothed his thoughts in brilliant style; set new standard of biography, in which, without sacrifice of historical truth, characters are portrayed as human beings (`Eminent Victorians' , `Portraits in Miniature')
Strachey, (Giles) Lytton (1880-1932), British biographer and literary critic who introduced a witty and impressionistic style of biography that was widely imitated. Strachey was born in London. He was associated with the intellectual Bloomsbury Group. His Eminent Victorians (1918)-short biographies of Florence Nightingale and others-won him widespread recognition. In this work, he carefully selected his facts to present highly personal portraits of his subjects. Strachey employed the same approach in his biographies Queen Victoria (1921), Elizabeth and Essex (1928), and Portraits in Miniature (1931). His critical articles, often appearing in The Spectator, were collected in Books and Characters (1922) and in Characters and Commentaries (1933).
Questions
Would you consider Strachey an impressionist biographer i.e. he gives short bursts of biographical material and allows these small insights to paint a bigger picture, or is he too intrusive with his own interpretation?
What affect do you think being in the Bloolmsbury group had on Strachey?