Introduction

Lytton Strachey was one of ten gifted children, born into an impressively talented family that was part of what Leonard Woolf once referred to as an ‘intellectual aristocracy of the middle class’. After quite an unconventional education, and studies at Liverpool University, his life took a decisive turn in 1899, when he went up to Cambridge University. Here he was soon elected to the Apostles and became the close friend of all the key male figures of the future Bloomsbury Group: Leonard Woolf, Clive Bell, Thoby Stephen, Saxon Sydney-Turner and John Maynard Keynes, all part of the generation of students marked by the personality and teaching of the philosopher G. E. Moore. It was following an introduction by Thoby Stephen that he met the two Stephen sisters, Virginia and Vanessa, whose presence was central to the formation of the Thursday evening gatherings at 46 Gordon Square that represent such a milestone in the history of British Modernism, and the changing map of London’s intellectual and artistic life in the first half of the twentieth century.

From his earliest days, Strachey set out to become a writer. Having inherited from his mother a passionate love for and a broad, highly sensitive understanding of the French language and its literature, Strachey’s first major publication was his Landmarks in French Literature (1912), a sadly under-rated work to this day. He then made his début as a public intellectual by becoming an outspoken conscientious objector from the outset of World War One. He wrote pamphlets for the No Conscription Fellowship, and began the series of witty, bitingly satirical biographical portraits, the publication of which, with the now iconic title Eminent Victorians (1918), established him as one of the major critical thinkers and biographers of his generation. It also pinpointed the iconoclastic break with the nineteenth century that the Bloomsbury generation were so often to approve (but which did not prevent any of them from acknowledging many of their own intellectual forebears from exactly the same era). Strachey’s method and style in Eminent Victorians, determined by ‘becoming brevity’ and a ‘freedom of spirit’, as he pithily observes in the opening Preface, were also to prove highly influential on the genre and the intellectual hallmark of biographical writing.