It's rare that a biographer has a life more interesting than his own subjects, but Lytton Strachey was a biography waiting to happen. The eleventh child of an Indian civil engineer and the essayist Lady Jane Strachey, Lytton went from being...
[more]It's rare that a biographer has a life more interesting than his own subjects, but Lytton Strachey was a biography waiting to happen. The eleventh child of an Indian civil engineer and the essayist Lady Jane Strachey, Lytton went from being a proper history student at Cambridge to living life as a decadent and sexually promiscuous all-around intellectual. He partied with the Bloomsbury group, dabbled in various forms of deviation, and shocked England with his fiery political statements. In the meantime, he managed to revolutionize the art of biography, introducing psychology and personal detail in place of the "official" version of public people's lives.
At the end of World War I, Strachey published "Eminent Victorians," a collection of short sketches of Victorian idols such as Florence Nightingale and Thomas Arnold. He skipped the rhetorical fluff and tried to elucidate the inner life -- for Strachey, paeans of praise had no place in the modern biography. He was a debunker of myths who combined scholarly erudition with a new form of sensitivity to detail -- not vulgar detail (don't expect juicy scandal from Strachey), but the telling, personal detail that makes up the narrative of the interior.
Strachey's books, especially "Eminent Victorians," are full of judgements as well as historical examination. He dug deep and wrote with a brass pen, using biography to question the decisions and convictions of his subjects. He tended to reveal motivation as much more complex than it appeared on the surface, especially the Victorian surface. If his revelations verged at times towards slander, his form made up for it; future biographers learned from Strachey's polished chronological storytelling.
Meanwhile, the greatest biography of all has proved to be Strachey's own. Strachey was largely overlooked in the dense woods of English literature until Michael Holroyd published an account of his life in 1968. Grander than any exposure Strachey ever attempted, Holroyd's biography weeded through the quarrels, love affairs, and genius of Strachey and the Bloomsbury group. The biography talks about his short-lived love triangle with Duncan Grant and John Maynard Keynes, and his later group affair with Dora Carrington, her husband, his lover, and Strachey's occasional male lover. At the same time that Holroyd's juicy account made Strachey's personal life famous, it also helped to introduce Strachey's books into contemporary circulation by depicting the razor-sharp mind behind the colorful life. In the end, Strachey knew instinctively how to make the greatest story out of personal lives -- both others' lives and his own.
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