Eminent Victorians Analysis

Altick, Richard. “Eminent Victorianism: What Lytton Strachey Hath Wrought.” American Scholar 64, no. 1 (Winter, 1995): 81-89. Argues that Strachey’s aim in Eminent Victorians was explicitly literary. Because he took such liberties with historical fact, it is Strachey’s method that came to be discredited, rather than the Victorian ethos he attempted to subvert.

_______. “The Stracheyan Revolution.” In Lives and Letters: A History of Literary Biography in England and America. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1966. An excellent summary of the pivotal role of Eminent Victorians in the development of biography as a genre. Surveys Strachey’s iconoclastic strategies.

Holroyd, Michael. Lytton Strachey: The New Biography. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995. Provides a rich historical context for understanding the development of Eminent Victorians, including information regarding negotiations with Strachey’s publisher. The first and fuller version of this biography, published in 1968, contains more literary criticism.

Monk, Ray. “This Fictitious Life: Virginia Woolf on Biography and Reality.” Philosophy and Literature 31, no. 1 (April, 2007): 1-40. Examines Woolf’s essay “The New Biography” (1927), which explored various ideas about the practice of writing biographies. Argues that Woolf erred in choosing Sidney Lee and Harold Nicolson as representative of the old and new styles, respectively; maintains that the “new style” was best exemplified by Strachey.

Powell, John. “Official Lives: Lytton Strachey, the Queen’s Cabinet, and the Eminence of Aesthetics.” Nineteenth Century Prose 22, no. 2 (Fall, 1995): 129-152. An analysis of Strachey’s introductory indictment of so-called official lives. Argues that a preoccupation with aesthetic form obscured Strachey’s concern for accurate biographical representation.

Stratford, Jenny. “Eminent Victorians.” British Museum Quarterly (Spring, 1968): 93-96. Provides a full description of Strachey’s four exercise books of notes and drafts, which are now in the British Library. Discusses the various influences on Strachey’s writing.

Taddeo, Julie Anne. Lytton Strachey and the Search for Modern Sexual Identity: The Last Eminent Victorian. New York: Harrington Park Press, 2002. Chronicles Strachey’s struggles as a gay and neurasthenic writer to defy Victorian ideology and create new forms of art and identity.