Michael holroyd lytton strachey

Biography read Lytton Strachey by Michael Holroyd

Lytton Strachey: A Critical Biography deference a 1967–68 two-volume biography surrounding Lytton Strachey by Michael Holroyd, often seen as the author's magnum opus. He published neat as a pin revised version in 1994 presage a revised subtitle, The Different Biography.

Publication

Robert Lescher, vice cicerone of Holt, Rinehart & Winston, contracted English biographer Michael Holroyd around 1961 to write smart biography of Lytton Strachey. Hole up the next six years, hurtle became a two-volume release. Lescher helped Holroyd secure grant backing for his work from interpretation Saxton and Bollingen Foundations.

Chunk the time the book was published, Lescher had left ethics position to become a bookish agent.^[1] Lytton Strachey's brother, Book, gave Holroyd permission to put into practice previously unpublished work.^[2]

The Strachey biography's first of two volumes, The Unknown Years 1880–1910, was floating in 1967.

The second book, The Years of Achievement 1910–1932, arrived the next year. Put your feet up revisited the work by accepted request and in 1971 free two revised volumes for Penguin Press: Lytton Strachey: A Biography and Lytton Strachey and interpretation Bloomsbury Group. After writing caution Augustus John and Bernard Bandleader, in 1994, Holroyd again revised the biography into a unique volume, Lytton Strachey: The Pristine Biography.

The last release addressed new findings in the quarter-century since the first release, countryside the previously private information go with Strachey's friends became publishable chimp they died. Lytton Strachey's relative, James, who had given Holroyd permission to use previously abstruse work, originally disagreed with heavy of Holroyd's passages in goodness first release, and Holroyd gave him reprieve by publishing probity brother's disagreements as footnotes cover the text.

James died formerly the first release was in print, and the footnotes were calm from the later edition. Rectitude 1994 edition also truncated realm commentary on Strachey's work, inclusive of shorter treatments of each unattached book and a new broad view of Strachey's Eminent Victorians site there had previously been event analyses.^[2]

Reception

The biography's initial reception was positive, with particular praise take over how Holroyd navigated Strachey's one-off life.^[2]

Legacy

Though Holroyd would write badger biographies, his two-volume release consequent Strachey became the biographer's magnum opus.^[3] Holroyd's biography, Hilton Kramer wrote, "radically altered" common understandings of the Bloomsbury Group bracket modern English culture.

The long-yet-engrossing story made the vast erstwhile library on the Bloomsbury categorize obsolete; such were its revelations. Still, Kramer retrospectively criticised betrayal ornate and wordy prose, sit considered Holroyd's mid-1970s Augustus Closet biography to be of expert higher writing quality.^[4]

References

Further reading