Manning was the leader of England's Catholics, Nightingale pretty much created the nursing profession, Arnold was the headmaster of Rugby and helped create the British public schools, and Gordon was ultimately a tragic figure, the victim of anti-colonial Muslim armies in Sudan. And it says something about Lytton himself too. Li’s diplomatic language, however, was less unconventional. Flag this item for. Khartoum fell into the Ahmed's hands, and Gordon was killed. Strachey's wit is no less cutting than his pen, exposing with relentless precision the hypocrisy, the ambition, the immorality and in some cases outright cruelty of some of the Victorian age's most treasured legends. Lytton Strachey wrote about four of the 18th Century's "heroes".
I did learn a lot from the book, and Strachey writes beautifully.Strachey has a wonderfully arch and witty prose style which makes these four biographies of zealously religious types (Cardinal Manning, Florence Nightingale, Doctor Arnold and General Gordon), palatable and at times gripping, even if you’re not familiar with the subjects.Strachey has a wonderfully arch and witty prose style which makes these four biographies of zealously religious types (Cardinal Manning, Florence Nightingale, Doctor Arnold and General Gordon), palatable and at times gripping, even if you’re not familiar with the subjects.Giles Lytton Strachey was a British writer and critic. You submitted the following rating and review. Where to start then? He never speaks of such. In so doing, he makes a powerful argument for the art of the biography against the questionable value of idealized This is a marvelous collection of short biographies for four great figures of the Victorian age: Dr. Arnold, Florence Nightingale, Cardinal Manning and General Gordon. Lytton Strachey's quartet of pithy biographies, Eminent Victorians (1918), wittily, Wilde-ishly distorts the character and accomplishments of four noble worthies -- Cardinal Manning, Florence Nightingale, Thomas Arnold, and General Gordon -- in order to burlesque the nineteenth-century's most dearly held virtues: faith, hard work, learning, and courage. The best, however, is reserved for last in “The End of General Gordon.” And here’s why I say that Strachey “mostly” but not entirely succeeds in his take-down, because for all his personal misalignments Strachey’s Gordon Pasha (like Nightingale to a degree) is nonetheless an object of legitimate awe, even when his goals seem to us culpably eccentric. It replaced reverence with skepticism and Strachey's wit, iconoclasm, and narrative skill liberated the biographical enterprise. It is, among other things, thoroughly entertaining. And his subjects are such powerful personalities, so genuinely significant and representative of their era, that they more than survive Strachey’s aesthetic debunking. The British government sent Gordon to Khartoum to lead an evacuation of the area. By. I liked the form Strachey uses; it's imaginative non-fiction which almost becomes fiction at times with its sense of the subjects as characters whose nature is intuited rather than strictly evidenced.Lytton Strachey wrote about four of the 18th Century's "heroes". His 1921 biography Queen Victoria was awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize.“For ignorance is the first requisite of the historian──ignorance, which simplifies and clarifies, which selects and omits, with a placid perfection that unattainable by the highest art.”“Human beings are too important to be treated as mere symptoms of the past. But its derisive criticism of the past generation's pretense helped to usher in a new, Modern period of literature, and Strachey's probing of his subjects' psyches and his experiments with the structure of his lives profoundly influenced the scope and style of twentieth-century biography.
It is very well written, and hilarious in parts.
So far, I find Strachey a bit of a 'carper' and a 'poseur'. Ultimately they were defeated. You can also read the full text online using our ereader. It replaced reverence with skepticism and Strachey's wit, iconoclasm, and narrative skill liberated the biographical enterprise.