LYTTON STRACHEY 2 Volumes

by Michael Holroyd ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 25, 1968

In his preface to Eminent Victorians, the revisionist biographer Lytton Strachey declared that he wished to avoid ""scrupulous narration"" and, in an impressionistic fashion, shoot ""a sudden revealing, searchlight into obscure recesses."" Mr. Holroyd is well aware that his subject would find this inexhaustibly scrupulous biography, which runs to more than 1150 pages, ironic. Certainly it is to a degree justified by the fact that Holroyd has had access to up until now withheld papers and letters, and also because he has recorded Strachey's entire generation as well the hothouse blooms known as the Bloomsbury Group of which Strachey was a salient member. This unarguably definitive biography just and dispassionate (and particularly critical of Strachey's works and their summary to shallow judgments) also does little to attract sympathies toward this febrile, fretful figure, from childhood on a ""nervous spirit. . . in a sickly body."" The first volume covers his childhood, schooling and postgraduate years; at Trinity the friendship with Leonard Woolf and Desmond MacCarthy and Bertrand Russell which would lead on to the whole coterie of Edwardian sensibilities; Rupert Brooke, painter Duncan Grant (""the most wretched"" of his emotional attachments-he was homosexual); Virginia and Vanessa Stephen (Strachey proposed to the former): with Lady Ottoline Morrell as presiding patroness and ""pastoral shepherdess."" Of Lytton's longstanding relationships- the most curious was that with Garrington. Dora Carrington, with whom he lived (asexually) on and off for years and who ""adored every hair of [his] bread."" Delicate, reserved, consumingly ambitious (""to do some good to the world"") and desperate for love (""let me love and be loved"") Lytton Strachey is to some extent an epicene phenomenon of a period in which he found recognition even though it would eventually be reversed. . . . Holroyd's biography will receive wide critical coverage and should not intimidate general readers (by its length or price). It is a more imposing achievement than its subject, and a font of personal and literary particulars on the man and the era.

Pub Date: April 25, 1968

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Holt, Rinchart & Winston

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1968

Categories: NONFICTION