Lytton Strachey

English · 1880 to 1932

Born Giles Lytton Strachey on March 1, 1880, in Clapham, London, he was the eleventh of thirteen children of Sir Richard Strachey, a general and administrator of British India, and Jane Maria Grant, a literary hostess who encouraged his early reading. Frail from childhood and educated at a succession of schools before Trinity College, Cambridge, he was elected to the Cambridge Apostles, the secret discussion society where he met John Maynard Keynes and Leonard Woolf and helped form the nucleus of what became the Bloomsbury Group. He failed twice to win a college fellowship and supported himself for years by reviewing for the Spectator and other journals. Then, in 1918, came Eminent Victorians, four irreverent short biographies of Cardinal Manning, Florence Nightingale, Thomas Arnold, and General Gordon, written with a deflating wit that broke the reverent mode of Victorian life-writing and made him famous overnight. Queen Victoria (1921) followed, dedicated to Virginia Woolf and warmer in tone, and then Elizabeth and Essex (1928), a more speculative experiment. He was a conscientious objector during the First World War; asked at his tribunal what he would do if a German soldier tried to rape his sister, he reportedly replied that he would try to interpose his own body. His thin frame, long red beard, and high reedy voice made him a figure of legend in his circle. He lived for many years with the painter Dora Carrington at Ham Spray House, in one of Bloomsbury's most unconventional households. He died of undiagnosed stomach cancer on January 21, 1932, at Ham Spray, aged fifty-one. Carrington, unable to bear his loss, shot herself two months later.