Lytton Strachey

Thirty-five sketches, including pieces on Voltaire, Frederick the Great, Rousseau, Gibbon, Walpole, Boswell, Carlyle, and Sarah Bernhardt, by one of the great biographical writers of this century. Companion volume to Strachey's Literary Essays. Index.

"This enchanting volume is not a history of the Victorian age but the portraiture of a woman... Strachey's work is pure art...a narrative as fresh and distinctive as some delicious perfume." -David Muzzey, Political Science Quarterly, (1922) Queen Victoria (1921) is the classic biography of Britain's greatest monarch by Lytton Strachey. Victoria (1819-1901) was Queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland from 1837 until her death. In addition, she was Empress of India beginning in 1876. With her reign of 63 years, she gave her name to an era, the Victorian age. This was a period of expansion of the British Empire, and industrial, scientific, political, cultural, and military change.Queen Victoria was awarded the "James Tait Black Memorial Prize," one of Britain's oldest literary awards.

Lytton Strachey is a member of the Bloomsbury Group and its book Eminent Victorians was initially published in 1918 and includes biographies of 4 notable Victorian individuals. Strachey's irreverence as well as wit gained recognition because it had been applied to three men and a woman that were previously viewed as heroes. Cardinal Manning, Florence Nightingales, Thomas Arnold as well as General Charles Gordon. Even though Nightingale is praised and her reputation enhanced, it presents some other subject matter in a less than attractive light - for instance, the plots of Cardinal Manning and Cardinal Newman.