Eminent Victorians / Modern Library 100 Best Nonfiction Books (ePub)

is reported that Bertrand Russell laughed out loud while reading Eminent Victorians during his imprisonment for antiwar activities.

Strachey scored a triumphant success with his next biography, Queen Victoria (1921). Although he set out to reveal the mediocrity of Victoria's character, critics agree that instead Strachey became totally enraptured by his subject. "Queen Victoria is an achievement of genius, and it has revolutionized the art of biography," wrote E. M. Forster. "Strachey did what no biographer had done before: he managed to get inside his subject. Earlier biographers, like Macaulay and Carlyle, had produced fine and convincing pictures of people; Lytton Strachey makes his people move; they are alive, like characters in a novel. . . . A whole society and its inhabitants rise from the grave, and walk about. . . . Queen Victoria is a masterpiece." Virginia Woolf agreed: "Victoria is a triumphant success. . . . In time to come Lytton Strachey's Queen Victoria will be Queen Victoria, just as Boswell's Johnson is now Dr. Johnson. The other versions will fade and disappear."

Strachey pushed the boundaries of biography still further in Elizabeth and Essex (1928). Sometimes considered a historical drama rather than a formal biography, it presents a compelling Freudian analysis of Queen Elizabeth. Though the book was attacked by many critics for its lurid portrayal of the monarch's sexuality, Sigmund Freud praised Elizabeth and Essex in a letter to Strachey. "As a historian you show that you are steeped in the spirit of psychoanalysis," he wrote. "You have approached one of the most remarkable figures in your country's history, you have known how to trace back her character to the impressions of her childhood, you have touched upon her most hidden motives with equal boldness and discretion, and it is very possible that you have succeeded in making a correct reconstruction of what actually occurred."

Portraits in Miniature (1931), the last volume that Strachey published during his lifetime, comprises a series of biographical "silhouettes" written throughout the 1920s. Edmund Wilson said of it: "In Portraits in Miniature, which seems to me one of Strachey's real triumphs, he gives glimpses, through a series of thumb-nail sketches of for the most part minor historical and literary personages, of the evolution of modern society from the Elizabethan to the Victorian Age."

Lytton Strachey died at Ham Spray House, his home in Berkshire, on January 21, 1932. Characters and Commentaries, a collection of his literary criticism, appeared the following year as a companion volume to the earlier Books and Characters (1922). His other posthumously published books include The Collected Works of Lytton Strachey (1948), Ermyntrude and Esmeralda (1969), Lytton Strachey by Himself (1971), and The Shorter Strachey (1980). In assessing his achievements biographer Leon Edel noted: "What Strachey understood, for all his abrasiveness, was the principle of human volatility; he knew that the ego seeks at all costs its basic defenses; and he knew what other biographers had not learned—that a biographical subject is consistently ambiguous, irrational, inexplicable, self-contradicting; hence, it truly lends itself to irony and to delicacies of insight and sentiment. . . . Lytton Strachey had dared to do what other biographers feared: to interpret his materials courageously, to say what things meant."

Virginia Woolf agreed: "The figure of Lytton Strachey is so important a figure in the history of biography that it compels a pause. For his three famous books, Eminent Victorians, Queen Victoria, and Elizabeth and Essex, are of a stature to show both what biography can do and what biography cannot do. . . . The anger and the interest that his short studies of Eminent Victorians aroused showed that he was able to make Manning, Florence Nightingale, Gordon, and the rest live as they had not lived since they were actually in the flesh. . . . In the lives of the two great Queens, Elizabeth and Victoria, he attempted a far more ambitious task. Biography had never had a fairer chance of showing what it could do. For it was now being put to the test by a writer who was capable of making use of all the liberties that biography had won."