Product Description
Eminent Victorians is a groundbreaking work of biography that raised the genre to the level of high art. It replaced reverence with skepticism and Strachey's wit, iconoclasm, and narrative skill liberated the biographical enterprise. His portraits of Cardinal Manning, Florence Nightingale, Thomas Arnold, and General Gordon changed perceptions of the Victorians for a generation.
Lytton Strachey's biographical essays on four "eminent Victorians" dropped an explosive charge on Victorian England when the book was published in 1918.It ushered in the modern biography and raised the genre to the level of high literary art. Strachey approached his subjects with skepticism rather than reverence, and his iconoclastic wit and engaging narratives thrilled as well as shocked his contemporaries. Debunking Church, Public School and Empire, his portraits of Cardinal Manning, Florence Nightingale, Dr. Arnold of Rugby, and General Gordon of Khartoum changed perceptions of the Victorians for a generation. This edition is unique in being fully annotated and in drawing on the full range of Strachey's manuscript materials and literary remains.Amazon.com Review
The four biographical essays that make up Eminent Victorians createdsomething of a stir when they were first published in the spring of 1918,bringing their author instant fame. In his flamboyant collection, LyttonStrachey chose to stray far from the traditional mode of biography: "Thosetwo fat volumes, with which it is our custom to commemorate the dead--whodoes not know them, with their ill-digested masses of material, theirslipshod style, their tone of tedious panegyric, their lamentable lack ofselection, of detachment, of design?" Instead he provided impressionisticbut acute (and, some said, skewed) portraits. Rarely does Strachey explorethe details of a subject's daily or family life unless they point directlyto an issue of character. In short, he pioneered a deeply sardonic andoften scathingly funny biographical style.

None of Strachey's Victorians emerge unscathed. In his hands, FlorenceNightingale is not a gentle archangel descended from heaven to ministersweetly to wounded soldiers, but rather an exacting, dictatorial, andjudgmental crusader. Her "pen, in the virulence of its volubility, wouldrush ... to the denunciation of an incompetent surgeon or the ridicule of aself-sufficient nurse. Her sarcasm searched the ranks of the officials withthe deadly and unsparing precision of a machine-gun. Her nicknames wereterrible. She respected no one." Dr. Thomas Arnold, the man appointed torevamp the very private British public school system, fares little better:in Strachey's acid ink, he became "the founder of the worship of athleticsand the worship of good form." In this same vain, military hero GeneralGordon is portrayed as a temperamental, irascible hermit, occasionallydrunk and often found in the company of young boys--a man who tended toforget and forgo the tenets found in the Bible he kept with him always. Andthe powerful and popular Cardinal Manning, who came within a hair's breadthof succeeding Pope Pius IX, belonged, Strachey writes, "to that class ofeminent ecclesiastics ... who have been distinguished less for saintlinessand learning than for practical ability."

As he offered up indelible sketches of his less-than-fab four, Strachey wasintent on critiquing established mores. This effortlessly superior wit knewfull well that deep convictions and good deeds often go hand in hand withhypocrisy, arrogance, and egomania. His task was to pique those whopretended they did not. --Jordana Moskowitz ... Read more

Customer Reviews (24)

The Victorians Were Never the Same
Lytton Strachey is credited with reinventing the art of writing biographies in his brilliant Eminent Victorians. Strachey published the book in 1918, not long after the end of the Victorian Era. Rather than attempt a comprehensive history of the Victorian Era, which he viewed as impossible, Strachey instead wrote short biographies of four truly eminent Victorians that punctured the moral pretensions and historical myths of that famous era.

Strachey's subjects are barely remembered today. I suppose Florence Nightingale's name has some small current familiarity because of its association with selflessly nursing injured soldiers. I found her biography to be the flattest of them all. She came from a privileged background, stubbornly resisted her parents' efforts to marry her off, and exerted remarkable energy, persistence, and fortitude to accomplish significant changes in military medicine (which previously languished in a horrific state).

Strachey's Dr. Arnold is a cautious educational reformer at best, rather than the revered innovator who established the English Public School system. The education provided at Arnold's Rugby School was quite limited with a dreary focus on religion and the classics. The sciences were entirely neglected. He did establish the prefectorial system whereby the old boys terrorized the younger boys who in their turn got to terrorize the next batch. Readers of Flashman will recognize Dr. Arnold as the head of the school that produced Tom Brown (and kicked Flashman out for drunkenness).

Strachey's treatment of the life of Cardinal Manning is fascinating although the subject is arcane. Even in 1918 when Strachey wrote his book he said that few remembered Manning.The Pope's recent visit to the UK highlighted one Manning's archrivals, Cardinal Newman. Both Manning and Newman had risen high in the Anglican hierarchy when the Oxford Movement gradually led them to doubt that Henry VIII had been divinely inspired when he founded that church. Both converted to Catholicism, but the politically astute Manning managed a meteoric rise to Cardinal (with the connivance of the Pope's top assistant) while Newman languished in obscurity. Newman had ideas and ideas were threatening and indeed essentially heretical to Pio Nono, Pius IX (the pope who formally decreed papal infallibility). Only in his dotage was Newman gifted the red hat when the Duke of Norfolk intervened with the Pope on his behalf. Strachey's life of Cardinal Manning is simply a treat of wonderful writing, wit, with a thorough skewering of papal pomposity.

The highlight of Eminent Victorians, for me, was the final biography of General Gordon, in which Strachey blows apart the mythology surrounding Gordon and indeed the Empire. Gordon had been hired by the leaders of Shanghai during the Taiping Rebellion to lead the Ever Victorious Army, which as Strachey notes had been seldom victorious prior to Gordon's ascendancy. Gordon famously dispatched the rebels.

Gordon later served as British governor-general of the Sudan, but more often worked as a mercenary. He had returned to England and relative obscurity when the Mahdi Revolt broke out in the Sudan (see Mahdi Revolt). Gladstone wanted nothing more than to exit the Sudan, but he needed someone self-effacing with diplomatic skill for the job. Conservative elements in Gladstone's own government hit upon Gordon as the ideal man for the job. It is difficult to imagine any person less suited for the task of withdrawing than the strong-willed, idiosyncratic, and mercurial Gordon. With the appointment made, the die was cast: Gordon arrived in Khartoum, decided he could not abandon those fine people, and ended up a martyr when the city was predictably overrun (refusing numerous opportunities to leave for safety). The Gordon biography is simply high art.

Bertrand Russell described Eminent Victorians as "brilliant, delicious, exquisitely civilized".I agree completely. Read it.

Classic
I gather this is a classic of biography.

I recently re-discovered Lytton Strachey, and am loving his work.

I understand his debunking of Victorian icons was shocking at the time.Ninety years on, his portraits seem basically fair and sympathetic to me.

Lytton Strachey is rolling in his grave.
This Wilder Publications edition of Eminent Victorians is the most poorly edited mess I have ever stopped reading. Gayle Turner

Excellent biographies; flawed commentary
John Sutherland's full commentary remedies the one defect - carelessness with factual detail - that mars Strachey's fascinating and informative biography of four eminent Victorians. However, Sutherland himself, like all other commentators I have read, has a serious fault, which could distort readers' understanding of what Strachey was doing. He assumes that Strachey "spectacularly subverted the certainties on which the Victorian age was founded" (page viii); that he "portrayed" "all four" as "neurotics"; was "examining the dark and dirty labyrinth of Victorian unconsciousness" (page xi); that he "spatters" "ridicule" on his subjects (Page xii); or, as the blurb on the back cover alleges, "Debunking Church, Public School, and Empire ..."
Strachey says in his preface that his biographies differ from "[t]hose fat two volumes ... with their tone of tedious panegyric." Anyone who has read Monypenny and Buckle's SIX volume biography of Disraeli, which goes out of its way to attribute to Disraeli every imaginable virtue (e.g., he loved children), knows what Strachey means.
However, if the reader ignores the allegations of generations of commentators and looks at what Strachey wrote without preconception, he will see that he admired all four of his subjects and meant for his readers to admire them. "[A] perfect English gentleman" is the way Strachey describes Sydney Herbert (page 121), and Strachey's description of him in that paragraph and the following pages shows that he meant that as the highest praise. Strachey even treats with impartiality and often empathy the aspect of Victorian life that by the time he was writing must have already seemed strange: the centrality of "old time religion" in the thought and lives of educated Victorians. (From the inception of printing through the year 1900, more books were published in the United Kingdom on religion than on all other subjects combined.)
Different as Strachey's subjects are from each other, they have one thing in common. All were rebels. Manning deserted the Church of England, one of the central pillars of the Victorian establishment. Nightingale defied the expectations of the way an upper-class woman should lead her life to challenge relentlessly and adamantly the British army and radically reform the nursing profession and army hospitals. Arnold radically reformed another bastion of the establishment: the public (i.e., private) schools. Gordon was an eccentric loner, who followed the opposite policy from the one he was sent to Khartoum to implement.
Nevertheless, all were greatly admired by those whom they led or cared for: Manning by British Catholics, Nightingale by the soldiers under her supervision, Arnold by his students (page 165), and Gordon by the people of the Sudan (page 208). More strikingly, these rebels, radicals, and eccentrics were heroes of British society; they were "eminent Victorians" in their own time. This fact must force the reader to re-assess one of the most prevalent stereotypes about the Victorians: their supposed insistence on conventionality and conformity.
In fact, Strachey achieved what Collingwood stated was the goal of history in his classic study The Idea of History (pages 231-49). He reconstructed a plausible and coherent account of what his four subjects (and several of the people with whom they interacted) were like, what motivated them, what "made them tick." It must be added (and this also fulfilled Collingwood's requirement) that Strachey's account is not plausible of human beings in general. Rather, it is historically plausible; it is plausible considering the specific time and place in which his subjects lived; and by providing it, Strachey illuminated important aspects of Victorian life and thought.

Absolutely incredible!
In the early 20th century, Lytton Strachey set the standard for the biography. Prior to his, biographies were often boring lists of accomplishments.

These are clearly the best biographies I have read: Cardinal Manning, Florence Nightingale, Dr. Arnold, and General Gordon. ... Read more

Product Description
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.

Customer Reviews (2)

fun read!
This book pulls you in from the beginning. It's not a dry history but a witty and sharp look at the Bloomsbury Group and issues about sex and gender in England. She can be critical of Strachey's misogyny and class elitism while at the same time she makes her readers feel strongly about the plight of the gay man during a repressive era. The book is loaded with fascinating stories about his relationships with Virginia Woolf, Dora Carrington, and John Maynard Keynes. Sodomy, war, complicated love affairs--what more could a reader ask for?!

Wow!A great read!
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!). ... Read more

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In the context of a detailed reading of all Strachey's works and of the Strachey Papers in the British Library, this study argues against the presentations of Strachey as a mere debunker of reputation and belletristic literary critic. ... Read more

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The Stracheys were an exceptionally intelligent and unusual family. Prominent in imperial administration, science, and feminism in the nineteenth century, and in the suffrage movement, women's education, and the bringing of new approaches to sexuality in the twentieth century, they had a wide and significant influence. Examining Lytton Strachey, his parents and nine siblings, Barbara Caine provides a fascinating picture of a diverse and complex family in a period of change from Victorian England to the beat generation. ... Read more

Product Description
A "triangular trinity of happiness" was how Dora Carrington described her early life with her husband Ralph Partridge and the writer Lytton Strachey. But, as Virginia Woolf foretold, Carrington's marriage was riskier than most: the boundaries of the menage shifted, like ice flows, to accommodate lovers who came and went, but the pivotal focus of Carrington's life remained her all-abiding passion for Strachey. This screenplay is the story of their lives together, as depicted in a film starring Jonathan Pryce and Emma Thompson. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Fascinating
What a fascinating, tragic life. This book is well written and flows along very easily, based largely on written correspondence. I have also seen the movie ("Carrington") and there are a few discrepancies, but notmany. ... Read more