Eminent Victorians [Paperback]

A genre-changing work of biography

Eminent Victoriansmarked an epoch in the art of biography; it also helped to crack the old myths of high Victorianism and to usher in a new spirit by which chauvinism, hypocrisy and the stiff upper lip were debunked. In it, Strachey cleverly exposes the self-seeking ambitions of Cardinal Manning and the manipulative, neurotic Florence Nightingale; and in his essays on Dr Arnold and General Gordon, his quarries are not only his subjects but also the public-school system and the whole structure of nineteenth-century liberal values.

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Preface

Cardinal Manning
Florence Nightingale
Dr Arnold
The End of General Gordon

Lytton Strachey, whose iconoclastic reexaminations of historical figures forever changed the course of modern biographical writing, was born in London on March 1, 1880. He was educated in a series of private schools and attended University College, Liverpool, before entering Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1899. In London he found work as an essayist for various journals and became the drama critic forThe Spectator. The favorable reception of his first book,Landmarks in French Literature(1912), bolstered his commitment to writing. Virginia Woolf said: 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, andElizabeth and l3