Word: lytton
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...LYTTON STRACHEY, by Michael Holroyd. The madly eccentric life and odd times of the author of Eminent Victorians, overwhelmingly documented in 1,229 improbably fascinating pages...
...LYTTON STRACHEY, by Michael Holroyd. The author of Eminent Victorians was undoubtedly the oddest duck on the Bloomsbury pond, a fact amply documented on nearly every one of the 1,229 fascinating pages of this two-volume biography...
Lugubrious Comedy. Holroyd is thorough and judiciously appreciative in his treatment of Strachey's work, but he reserves his full concentration for the egomaniacal oddball himself. The biographer was given access, by Strachey's brother James, to 30,000 letters that flowed between Lytton, his family and his Bloomsbury intimates. In his letters, he disgorged himself of the full, untidy range of his lusts, ambitions, despair, sickness, vanity and, best of all, his maliciously acute observations of the people and places he knew. The letters alone make an overwhelming self-portrait, and to them Holroyd adds a detailed...
...revenge. Instead, she fell in love with him, and moved in to take care of him for the rest of his life. That was fine with Strachey, who later fell in love with a beau of Carrington's named Ralph Partridge. Carrington married Partridge and shared him with Lytton; when Partridge fell in love with another woman and Carrington had a fling, the menage a trois became Waterloo Station. Though Strachey failed in a few gentlemanly attempts to consummate his fondness for Carrington, she remained in permanent thrall to him and committed suicide after his death from cancer...
Holroyd notes in his preface that "it may seem ironic that the life and work of Lytton Strachey should finally be commemorated by two fat volumes-that standard treatment of the illustrious dead that he was so effective in stamping out." Ironic it is, but not half so much as it would have been if his biographer had followed Strachey's example and given short shrift to one of the best subjects of this century...