Knowra Lytton Strachey Lytton Strachey Lytton Strachey (1880–1932) was an English biographer and essayist whose concise, irreverent portraits challenged Victorian reverence for celebrated lives and helped reshape modern biography.
Eminent Victorians : Lytton Strachey’s 1918 collection of four sharply critical portraits of prominent Victorian figures. Its four biographies established the concise, irreverent style most associated with Strachey.
Character sketch : A concise account emphasizing a person’s distinctive traits rather than recounting an entire life. Strachey built memorable portraits by selecting details that exposed defining contradictions.
Queen Victoria (biography) : Lytton Strachey’s 1921 biography of the British monarch, Queen Victoria. The book applies his brisk, psychologically alert portraiture to a long-reigning sovereign.
Virginia Woolf : An English modernist writer and critic, and a central member of the Bloomsbury Group. Woolf was Strachey’s close friend and later wrote a biographical essay about him.
Queen Victoria : Queen of the United Kingdom from 1837 to 1901, whose reign gave its name to the Victorian era. Strachey’s biography recast the monarch as a complex individual rather than a monumental symbol.
Irony : A mode of expression in which meaning differs from, or is sharpened by contrast with, the literal wording or situation. His dry irony turns reverential accounts of eminent figures into pointed criticism.
Elizabeth and Essex : Lytton Strachey’s 1928 book about Elizabeth I and her relationship with Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex. Its dramatic account of power and intimacy extends his method beyond Victorian subjects.
Leonard Woolf : An English political theorist, publisher, and writer associated with the Bloomsbury Group. Leonard Woolf was among Strachey’s close Bloomsbury contemporaries and colleagues.
Bloomsbury Group : An informal circle of British writers, artists, and intellectuals active chiefly in the early twentieth century. Strachey’s friendships and intellectual life were closely tied to this circle.
Historical revisionism : The reinterpretation of accepted historical accounts using new evidence or changed perspectives. Strachey questioned inherited judgments about Victorian public figures rather than repeating them.
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