false 63011 1 1 108824 0192801589 9780192801586 14 http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1171591669m/108824.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/108824.Eminent_Victorians 3.70 122 Eminent Victorians created something of a stir when they were first published in the spring of 1918, bringing their author instant fame. In his flamboyant collection, Lytton Strachey chose to stray far from the traditional mode of biography: "Those two fat volumes, with which it is our custom to commemorate the dead--who does not know them, with their ill-digested masses of material, their slipshod style, their tone of tedious panegyric, their lamentable lack of selection, of detachment, of design?" Instead he provided impressionistic but acute (and, some said, skewed) portraits. Rarely does Strachey explore the details of a subject's daily or family life unless they point directly to an issue of character. In short, he pioneered a deeply sardonic and often scathingly funny biographical style.

None of Strachey's Victorians emerge unscathed. In his hands, Florence Nightingale is not a gentle archangel descended from heaven to minister sweetly to wounded soldiers, but rather an exacting, dictatorial, and judgmental crusader. Her "pen, in the virulence of its volubility, would rush ... to the denunciation of an incompetent surgeon or the ridicule of a self-sufficient nurse. Her sarcasm searched the ranks of the officials with the deadly and unsparing precision of a machine-gun. Her nicknames were terrible. She respected no one." Dr. Thomas Arnold, the man appointed to revamp the very private British public school system, fares little better: in Strachey's acid ink, he became "the founder of the worship of athletics and the worship of good form." In this same vain, military hero General Gordon is portrayed as a temperamental, irascible hermit, occasionally drunk and often found in the company of young boys--a man who tended to forget and forgo the tenets found in the Bible he kept with him always. And the powerful and popular Cardinal Manning, who came within a hair's breadth of succeeding Pope Pius IX, belonged, Strachey writes, "to that class of eminent ecclesiastics ... who have been distinguished less for saintliness and learning than for practical ability."

As he offered up indelible sketches of his less-than-fab four, Strachey was intent on critiquing established mores. This effortlessly superior wit knew full well that deep convictions and good deeds often go hand in hand with hypocrisy, arrogance, and egomania. His task was to pique those who pretended they did not. --Jordana Moskowitz]]> 63011 3.68 247 43 437518 0156027569 9780156027564 6 http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1174767702m/437518.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/437518.Queen_Victoria 3.79 42 </div>]]> 63011 3.68 247 43 421002 0156027615 9780156027618 3 http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1174590221m/421002.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/421002.Elizabeth_and_Essex_A_Tragic_History 3.32 25 </div>]]> 63011 3.68 247 43 108823 0374258546 9780374258542 3 http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1171591669m/108823.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/108823.The_Letters_of_Lytton_Strachey 3.62 8
The breadth of his correspondence is breathtaking, going from precocious childhood letters to those written when he was a member of the secret Cambridge Apostles, and from letters to Leonard and Virginia Woolf, to Maynard Keynes and other members of the Bloomsbury Group, to love letters to Dora Carrington and Duncan Grant. The thousands of letters he wrote retain their vitality to this day, discussing changes in morals, the writing of history, literature and philosophy, politics, war and peace, and the advent of modernism.

Strachey believed that one only really comes to know a writer by reading his correspondence, and if these playful, provocative, and eminently sensible letters attest to anything, it is to the soundness of this belief.
</div>]]> 63011 3.68 247 43 108826 0156126168 9780156126168 0 http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1171591670m/108826.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/108826.Biographical_Essays 3.67 3 </div>]]> 63011 3.68 247 43 3787262 0030859956 9780030859953 0 http://www.goodreads.com/images/nocover-111x148.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3787262.Lytton_Strachey_by_himself_a_self_portrait 4.50 2 63011 3.68 247 43 1491873 1426460759 9781426460753 0 http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1184199035m/1491873.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1491873.Books_and_Characters_French_and_English 4.00 2 63011 3.68 247 43 1965502 142646374X 9781426463747 0 http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1190991454m/1965502.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1965502.Landmarks_in_French_Literature 3.50 2 63011 3.68 247 43 2752559 1604592079 9781604592078 1 http://www.goodreads.com/images/nocover-111x148.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2752559.The_Biography_of_Florence_Nightingale 5.00 1 63011 3.68 247 43 7001098 0 http://www.goodreads.com/images/nocover-111x148.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7001098-queen-victoria 4.00 1 63011 3.68 247 43