Lytton Strachey by Himself: A Self-Portrait

by Lytton Strachey, Michael Holroyd (Editor)

Lytton Strachey By Himself A Self Portrait

Genres: Biography, Nonfiction, British Literature

Hardcover

First published January 1, 1971

About the author

Giles Lytton Strachey was a British writer and critic. He is best known for establishing a new form of biography in which psychological insight and sympathy are combined with irreverence and wit. His 1921 biography Queen Victoria was awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize.

Reviews

[Carol · Rating 3 out of 5]

Strachey is best known through his letters, diaries and personal writing which he maintained throughout his life. This book gathers together his diaries, which he wrote in solitude for himself. It also contains autobiographical fragments, some travel journals, and two essays which were delivered to the Bloomsbury Memoir Club, plus occasional writings from periods of his life ranging from childhood to his last days.

Regarding his youth, we observe a confessional fragment on the first of his schoolboy love affairs, followed by a journal of his time studying literature at Liverpool University College. Next come reflections on Cambridge life and his preoccupations with sex, then an essay that records the events – or rather the thoughts and feelings – of a single day ‘Monday 16 June 1916′. This piece, written amidst the horrors of the first world war, conjures up a languorous, privileged visit to Vanessa Bell’s house at Charleston, doing virtually nothing the whole day long except lounge around in the garden, making plans to seduce the postman.

I read the 1971 edition and I found that I am not a fan of Strachey. But for those who are -- the editor of this book, Michael Holroyd, wrote "Lytton Strachey: The New Biography" and published in 2005 (600 pp. long.)

[Karen-Leigh · Rating 4 out of 5]

While researching his landmark biography of Lytton Strachey, Michael Holroyd had access to the fascinating Strachey archives. From this source he collected all Strachey's diaries and memoirs, which in this volume form an intermittent but not disconnected autobiography. From childhood diaries to the introspective and often anguished records of late adolescence an intimate self-portrait emerges, valuable for its own sake but also for the light it sheds on the most gifted members of the Bloomsbury Group. In addition to the diaries are two autobiographical essays and a journal written months before his death.