"This is as definitive a study of Strachey and his entire fascinating era as one could wish. As always, master biographer Holroyd writes smoothly and with just the right amount of detail; no one will be bored--and the book's history notwithstanding, no one will be shocked by his revelations either. Highly recommended."--Library Journal. Photos.
Book Description
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
Holroyd's big, gossipy life of English historian Lytton Strachey (1880-1932), first published in 1968 and now in a revised, expanded edition, offers a vibrant, intimate portrait of the Bloomsbury circle, their love affairs, jealousies and creative ferment. In Eminent Victorians (1918), Strachey stripped away the pious camouflage of Victorian society, targeting hypocrisy, imperialism, militarism and religion. Holroyd, biographer of G.B. Shaw, credits Strachey with revolutionizing historical biography by emphasizing character and hidden sexuality and subverting traditional forms through caricature and psychological innuendo. Drawing on thousands of letters by Strachey and his Bloomsbury coterie, Holroyd unearths details of Strachey's adolescent self-loathing and sexual guilt; his proposing marriage to Virginia Woolf in an effort to renounce his homosexuality; his pacifism during WWI; and his relationship with his adoring live-in companion, painter Dora Carrington, who tolerated his gay affairs. This panoramic account of Strachey's trajectory from hypersensitive, shy Cambridge undergraduate to social and literary lion is peopled with the likes of D.H. Lawrence, Rupert Brooke, John Maynard Keynes, T.S. Eliot, Lady Ottoline Morrell, Augustus John and Bertrand Russell. Photos.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Review
"Written with vivacity and scrupulousness.... [Michael Holroyd] has a great novelist's sense of the obstinate mystery of the human person."
--This text refers to an alternate
Paperback
edition.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
42 of 49 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Was this life really so interesting?,
By MartinP "MartinP" (Nijmegen, The Netherlands) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Lytton Strachey: The New Biography (Paperback)
It is indeed a courageous undertaking to write the biography of the man who reinvented the genre. But, going by all the praise lavished on his life of Lytton Strachey, Holroyd has succeeded. And surely he cannot be faulted for his style of writing, which is lively, expressive, subtly humorous, and makes inventive use of metaphor. And yet, and yet... I became interested in Strachey not so much through reading his "Queen Victoria" which, frankly, I found rather boring and surprisingly humourless; but after seeing the movie "Carrington", based on Holroyds biography; - and much as I hate to say this, I liked the movie better. The main problem simply is that Strachey's life was too uneventful to command attention for nearly 700 pages. What you end up with is this image of an old-maidish, pampered, and astonishingly self-centred man forever reading books in the aloofness of his country cottage while unaccountably being the object of universal adoration. The final and supposedly climactic love-affair with Roger Senhouse might have provided some eleventh-hour excitement, but honestly doesn't amount to more than the cliché of the unattractive (but intelligent, rich and famous) middle aged man infatuated with the vapid, reluctant and opportunistic (but very pretty) much younger man. Surely Holroyd is a bit to blame as well for not gaining full hold of our (well, at least my) attention. Here we have The Apostles and the "Bloomsberries" in their heyday, with Diaghilev, Nijinsky and the likes casually thrown in as well. An incredible collection of brilliant and colourful people; and yet all they seem to occupy themselves with is bourgeois bickerings, common gossip, parties, parties, parties, and amorous obsessions of a peculiarly puerile nature. Where is all the wit and dazzling conversation that is frequently reported by Holroyd, but rarely demonstrated? We're told about a lot of people and things, but they remain abstractions. Even a character as bizarre as Ottoline Morrell remains a mere cipher. The frequent trips to France and Spain read like depersonalised itenaries from a travel agent's brochure, and we are kept in the dark about their meaning in Lytton's life. Unfortunately Holroyd reverts to an overdose of Freudian psycho-analytical blabla to lend depth to his characters. This largely obsolete approach to psychology remains a staple of biographers, probably because it offers such metaphorically appealing instant explanations of all relational problems and personal obsessions. Seeing rather too much of Mama lately? - hello Oedipus! Such off-the-peg explanations add very little to our understanding of the person. Actually I didn't find this book all too insightful psychologically speaking. E.g., the bouts of anxiety and depression that troubled Carrington in her final years pop up out of nowhere as a rather too hasty prelude to her suicide. Her complicated relationship with Strachey is underplayed, so that at times she emerges more like a luxury housekeeper with a talent for painting than as Strachey's ticket to survival. For clearly it was she alone who saved him from utter and desparate loneliness (as well as he her). Gretchen Gerzina's biography of Carrington, in all its compactness, is much closer to the essence and tragedy of both Carrington's and Lytton's personalities, and the peculiar chemistry between them, it seems to me. Another strange thing is that we get to know just about nothing about Strachey's sexual pursuits. Now call me unhealthily curious if you like, but Lytton himself was known to speak disparagingly of Virginia Woolf's books because of their 'lack of copulation'. So where is his own? How can you write 700 pages about one of the most notable and visible homosexuals in England at the time, and yet in the end leave the reader uncertain whether the man ever had any sexual contacts with anyone at all??? And the other, more troubling question that remains in the end is: why would this man deserve so much attention? His lasting output amounts to no more than three books. And Strachey may have thought Forster (another spectre relegated to the sidelines by Holroyd) a dreary 'old maid' (projection, the dedicated Freudian might wonder?), but himself certainly never mustered the courage or conviction to write something like "Maurice", let alone anything else approaching Forster's novelistic output! And output aside, Marie-Jacqueline Lancaster has shown in her collectors-item biography of Brian Howard, who was in many ways Strachey's extroverted counterpart, that you can even write a fascinating book about somebody who produced literally nothing at all of worth during his lifetime (could somebody please reprint this book!). Starting on Holroyds book I expected a classic like Furbank's Forster or Ellman's Wilde. Alas, it wasn't so; which is partly due to the fact that Strachey was simply a more superficial and less tragic or extravagant figure than either of these; and partly to the fact that Holroyd fails to make the most of the brilliant company he associated with.
17 of 19 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A Forgotten Artist,
By
This review is from: Lytton Strachey: The New Biography (Paperback)
Michael Holroyd's landmark biography of Lytton Strachey - a once-bright luminary of the Bloomsbury Group (including Virginia Woolf, E.M. Forster, John Maynard Keynes and others) - keeps the spirit and achievement of this great writer alive for future generations. Strachey is probably known now, if at all, for the eccentric figure portrayed in the film "Carrington" but his contributions to the art of biography go far beyond what the film conveyed. Holroyd does an excellent job of capturing the milieu of Strachey's times, in particular London and the surrounding countryside (where Strachey lived in a succession of cottages) in the early part of the 20th century. Not only is Strachey's admittedly idiosyncratic personality expertly portrayed, we also get a strong sense of other equally unique individuals who played such an important part in his life (Ottoline Morrell, for one). Holroyd also writes in a flowing, sometimes complicated manner, but this is a welcome change from dryer, academic recitations of dates and places. In fact, the narrative often reads like a long novel with a relaxed pace. It's also extremely forthright about Strachey's sexual inclinations - in fact, at its original publication in the mid-60s, it was among the first to be so forthcoming. In all, Holroyd is to be saluted for making Lytton Strachey's achievements better known (especially his book, "Eminent Victorians," which freed the biographical form from more conventional restrictions from the l9th century.)
10 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
An excellent biography of a key figure in Bloomsbury.,
By
This review is from: Lytton Strachey (Paperback)
Lytton Strachey was one of the key figures in the Bloomsbury group, and one of Virginia Wolf's best friends. He is best known today for his portraits of four famous Victorians in "Emminent Victorians." At the time, the book was something of piece of generational warfare; the figures that Strachey dismantles were models of piety and determination held up to Strachey's generation when they were young as the sort of people to emulate. Strachey, who was one of the wittiest men of his time, shows that actually they were something of narrowminded fanatics. Holroyd's biography is a superb portrait of Strachey and the circle he moved in. Well-documented, it brings to life many people never well-known in America. Strachey's personal life was extremely complicated; a woman named Carrington (she refused to use her first name which was Dora) fell desparately in love with him. This was unfortunate for her because Strachey was a confirmed homosexual. When examined for possible conscription during the First World War, he was asked what he would due if he saw a German trying to rape his sister; his response was "I should try to come between them." This made no difference to Carrington, whose love for him was so great that she committed suicide after his death. Carrington, and other figures who became involved in Strachey's complicated life make this almost a group biography. In fact, the biography was rereleased in connection with the movie "Carrington" (starred Emma Thompson in the title role and Jonathan Pryce as Strachey) and on the cover Carrington's name is in type as big as that used for Lytton Strachey. Holroyd's writing style is fluid, and his eye for a tellng anecdote make the biography eminently readable. One does not have to be obsessed with Bloomsbury to enjoy this book.
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