Lytton Strachey

Known for its advances in literature, industrialization, politics, and science, the Victorian era was a prominent time in British history. However, author Lytton Strachey remembers Queen Victoria as a person instead of just focusing on her accomplishments. First starting with a brief history of her predecessors and origins, Victoria was crowned just as she came of age. Having only been eighteen, Queen Victoria was widely unfamiliar to her subjects...

With authors such as Voltaire, Honore De Balzac, Victor Hugo, and so many more, French literature can be as intimidating as it is spectacular. Hoping to spread admiration and knowledge about the French literary canon, H.A.L Fisher, a former president of the board of education and prominent historian, sought out Lytton Strachey to write a survey of French literature. After accepting the commission, Strachey exceeded the original expectations, crafting...

Renowned literary critic and prose stylist Lytton Strachey republished some of his numerous literary essays in this volume. Here are fifteen of them examining the works of French and English authors, including Racine, Sir Thomas Browne, Shakespeare, Voltaire, Rousseau, and Blake, among others.

Selected by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best nonfiction books of all time
"Eminent Victorians" marked 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

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Florence Nightingale (1820—1910) was an English social reformer, statistician, and pioneer of modern nursing. She became famous during the time she served as manager and trainer of nurses during the Crimean War, giving nursing a positive reputation and becoming a Victorian culture icon. Also known as "The Lady with the Lamp", she was an accomplished writer who produced a large corpus of work related to medical knowledge. A great example of such...

Lytton Strachey fue el crítico literario por excelencia del final de la época victoriana; Virginia Woolf ya había escrito cuatro de sus grandes novelas (El cuarto de Jacob, La señora Dalloway, Orlando y Al faro); y ambos brillaban con luz propia en el muy exigente Círculo de Bloomsbury. A lo largo de veinticinco años, mediante la correspondencia que reúne este volumen, juzgaron con agudeza sus propias obras y las ajenas, se elogiaron y trituraron,...