Lytton strachey concept of biography of martin
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The Maurois/ Strachey relationship: a one-way admiration
As we are celebrating the centenary of Lytton Strachey’s masterpiece, Eminent Victorians, which stands as his seminal work and is more than ever considered to have revolutionized biography, I thought about the man who has invariably been seen in Great-Britain as one of his imitators1 on the Continent and wished to ponder over the two trajectories of these men, whose fates and works were linked in such a strange way. André Maurois was Strachey’s contemporary and although the two men rarely met, it is acknowledged (even by Maurois himself as we shall see) that Strachey’s works exerted a considerable influence on his career as a biographer2. I would like to try and understand why what worked so admirably for Strachey in Great-Britain did not work quite so well for Maurois in France. Strachey’s Eminent Victorians is still hailed as “the Biography that changed biography forever”3; the centennial anniversary of the publicatio
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Brian Finney on Martin Amis: The Biography
A Stupefied Outpouring of the Life: Richard Bradford’s “Martin Amis” (from the Los Angeles Review of Books)
On negativ Reviews
LET ME START with a few riders.
I am not in the habit of writing negative reviews. In fact, I’ve never written a predominantly negativ review of a book. I just politely decline. But this really awful biography of Martin Amis got beneath my skin, and its warm reception by about half its reviewers caused that infection to erupt in the form of this review.
A long time ago inom published a critical biography (of Christopher Isherwood) when he was close to the end of his life. So I understand the problems of combining biography and criticism of a living writer and his work.
I also published (in 2008) a book-length study of Martin Amis. This was the sixth book of criticism devoted to Amis’s writing. Yet Bradford’s critical biography shows no awareness of this body of work, none even referre
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Lytton Strachey
English writer and critic (1880–1932)
Giles Lytton Strachey (;[1] 1 March 1880 – 21 January 1932) was an English writer and critic. A founding member of the Bloomsbury Group and author of Eminent Victorians, he established a new form of biography in which psychological insight and sympathy are combined with irreverence and wit. His biography Queen Victoria (1921) was awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize.
Early life and education
[edit]Youth
[edit]Strachey was born on 1 March 1880 at Stowey House, Clapham Common, London, the fifth son and 11th child of Lieutenant General Sir Richard Strachey, an officer in the British colonial armed forces, and his second wife, the former Jane Grant, who became a leading supporter of the women's suffrage movement. He was named Giles Lytton after an early 16th-century Gyles Strachey and the first Earl of Lytton, who had been a friend of Richard Strachey's when he was Viceroy of India in the late 1870s