Essay
Eminent Victorians
Lytton Strachey · 1918
Synopsis
Four Victorian lives, those of a clergyman, a woman of action, an educator and an adventurer. Manning moves from the Church of England to Rome, rises in the Catholic hierarchy and manoeuvres against Newman. Florence Nightingale reorganises the military hospitals at Scutari and then, back home and ill, goes on weighing on the War Office from her sofa. Thomas Arnold, at the head of Rugby, sets the model for the English public schools. Gordon, an unruly and deeply religious soldier, is sent to the Sudan and besieged in Khartoum. The author takes them from the flank.
Context
The book was begun in 1912 under another title, and four lives of it remain. Its author then wrote to Virginia Woolf that their Victorian predecessors seemed to him a band of hypocrites. In his preface he announces a brevity that omits everything superfluous and nothing that matters, as against the two fat volumes of panegyric with which the dead were honoured. The book appeared in May 1918, in the last year of the war; a month later, the former prime minister Asquith praised it in a lecture at Oxford, and its author became famous overnight.
Who it is for
Four portraits to be read separately; in French, only one translation, by Jacques Dombasle, published in 1933 and reissued in 1980.
Prizes and reception
It is seen as opening a new era of biography, and as the model of literary biography in the twentieth century.
Sources for this page 10
The pages consulted to check this page.