Lytton Strachey - Softcover

Holroyd, Michael

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0030551919 ISBN 13: 9780030551918

Publisher: Henry Holt & Co, 1980

Synopsis

When Michael Holroyd's life of Strachey first appeared in 1967, it was hailed as a landmark in contemporary biography. Drawing now on new material, published and unpublished, Holroyd has completely revised and rewritten his masterwork to tell the full story of this complex man and his world as it could not be told while many of Strachey's friends and lovers were still alive. And at the heart of the story is the poignant liasion between Strachey and the painter Dora Carrington. A panorama of the social, literary, political and sexual life of a generation, LYTTON STRACHEY reverberates in the mind like a great novel.

About this title

About the Author:

Besides the biographies of Augustus John, Bernard Shaw and Lytton Strachey (which was filmed as Carrington), Michael Holroyd has written two volumes of memoirs, Basil Street Blues and Mosaic. He is the current president of the Royal Society of Literature and the only non-fiction writer to have been awarded the British Literature Prize. He lives in London and Somerset with his wife, the novelist Margaret Drabble.

From Publishers Weekly:

Holroyd's big, gossipy life of English historian Lytton Strachey (1880-1932), first published in 1968 and now in a revised, expanded edition, offers a vibrant, intimate portrait of the Bloomsbury circle, their love affairs, jealousies and creative ferment. In Eminent Victorians (1918), Strachey stripped away the pious camouflage of Victorian society, targeting hypocrisy, imperialism, militarism and religion. Holroyd, biographer of G.B. Shaw, credits Strachey with revolutionizing historical biography by emphasizing character and hidden sexuality and subverting traditional forms through caricature and psychological innuendo. Drawing on thousands of letters by Strachey and his Bloomsbury coterie, Holroyd unearths details of Strachey's adolescent self-loathing and sexual guilt; his proposing marriage to Virginia Woolf in an effort to renounce his homosexuality; his pacifism during WWI; and his relationship with his adoring live-in companion, painter Dora Carrington, who tolerated his gay affairs. This panoramic account of Strachey's trajectory from hypersensitive, shy Cambridge undergraduate to social and literary lion is peopled with the likes of D.H. Lawrence, Rupert Brooke, John Maynard Keynes, T.S. Eliot, Lady Ottoline Morrell, Augustus John and Bertrand Russell. Photos.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Henry Holt & Co
• Publication date: 1980
• ISBN 10: 0030551919
• ISBN 13: 9780030551918
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 1152