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| 5/9/1918 |
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Lytton Strachey, Eminent Victorians
On this day in 1918 Lytton Strachey's Eminent Victorians was published. Its four essays -- on Cardinal Manning, Florence Nightingale, Dr. Thomas Arnold and General Gordon -- are described by recent biographer Michael Holroyd as "one of the seminal Bloomsbury texts," a book which "let a genie, gleeful and irreverent, out of the bottle" of biography writing. |
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Internet Modern History Sourcebook
Find an excerpt from Eminent Victorians on Cardinal Manning:
"Had he lived in the Middle Ages he would certainly have been neither a Francis nor an Aquinas, but he might have been an Innocent. As it was, born in the England of the Nineteenth Century, growing up in the very seed-time of modern progress, coming to maturity with the first onrush of Liberalism, and living long enough to witness the victories of Science and Democracy, he yet, by a strange concatenation of circumstances, seemed almost to revive in his own person that long line of diplomatic and administrative clerics which, one would have thought, had come to an end for ever with Cardinal Wolsey. In Manning, so it appeared, the Middle Ages lived again." |  | The Bloomsbury Group
Offers concise biographies of many Bloomsbury figures, including Clive Bell, Roger Fry, Duncan Grant, John Maynard Keynes, Desmond MacCarthy, Lytton Strachey, and Leonard and Virginia Woolf.
"They really were the progressives and the embodiment of the avant-garde in early years of this century. Every time we look at them again they seem to have something for the contemporary world, whether in sexual ethics, liberation, biography, economics, feminism or painting."
— Michael Holroyd, in the San Francisco Chronicle, 1995 | | The Knitting Circle
Find a information about the author's life and works. With a small bibliography and two press clippings.
"Strachey ... was almost wholly forgotten until, in 1968, Michael Holroyd published his massive biography of the man. Not merely did Holroyd bring Strachey's own books -- Eminent Victorians, Elizabeth and Essex, Queen Victoria -- back into print and fashion but he launched, more or less single-handedly, the mania for the Bloomsberries. Suddenly, out of the elegant mahogany woodwork, they materialised, draped languid and boneless across a network of armchairs in Russell Square: Roger Fry, Maynard Keynes, Duncan Grant, the two Bells, Clive and Vanessa, the two Woolves, Leonard and Virginia, and, eternally bringing up the rear, the doomed, untalented Carrington."
-- Gilbert Adair, "Twentieth-Century Classics That Won't Last," The Independent on Sunday: Culture, 25th. May, 1999. | | Voltaire and Frederick the Great
Find an excerpt from Strachey's 1915 work, Books and Characters, French and English, which chronicles the duo's 40-year correspondence.
"Voltaire was forty-two years of age, and already one of the most famous men of the day, when, in August 1736, he received a letter from the Crown Prince of Prussia. This letter was the first in a correspondence which was to last, with a few remarkable intervals, for a space of over forty years. It was written by a young man of twenty-four, of whose personal qualities very little was known, and whose importance seemed to lie simply in the fact that he was heir-apparent to one of the secondary European monarchies. Voltaire, however, was not the man to turn up his nose at royalty, in whatever form it might present itself; and it was moreover clear that the young Prince had picked up at least a smattering of French culture, that he was genuinely anxious to become acquainted with the tendencies of modern thought, and, above all, that his admiration for the author of the Henriede and Zaire was unbounded." | |
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The TinL masthead features photography by
Natasha D'Schommer
, and the book art featured is by Jim Rosenau.
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