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Lytton Strachey - College Papers

Lytton Strachey

, English biographer, was born in 1880. He was an openly gay member of the artistically talented Bloomsbury Group, centering on Leonard and Virginia Woolf. (Strachey had once proposed to Virginia née Stephen, but she laughed. When he was conscripted in World War I, he declared himself to be a pacifist. When the board asked what he would do if a Hun were raping his sister, he said that he would try to interpose his body.) See the film Carrington to receive an interesting picture of Strachey. His biography Eminent Victorians was the first major anti-Victorian iconoclastic work.
He was a writer, but yet to publish Eminent Victorians' -an iconoclastic set of satirical biographical essays which ...

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Strachey, however, announced that he would write lives with "a brevity which excludes everything that is redundant and nothing that is significant," whether flattering to the subject or not. His intensely personal sketches scandalized stuffier readers but delighted many literati. Strachey's impressionistic portraits occasionally led to inaccuracy, since he selected the facts he liked and had little use for politics or religion. By portraying his "Eminent Victorians" as multifaceted, flawed human beings rather than idols, and by informing public knowledge with private information, Strachey ushered in a new era of biography.

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Ignorance is the first requisite of the historian -- ignorance, which simplifies and clarifies, which selects and omits, with a placid perfection unattainable by the highest art.

Strachey, Giles Lytton (1880-1932), English essayist and biographer; a profound analyst who clothed his thoughts in brilliant style; set new standard of biography, in ...

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PAPER DETAILS

Added: 3/16/2004 07:05:35 AM
Category: Biographies
Type: Premium Paper
Words: 490
Pages: 2

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