Lytton Strachey

Part I of Essay
, English biographer, was born in 1880. He was an openly gay member of the artistically talented Bloomsbury Group, centering on Leonard and Virginia Woolf. (Strachey had once proposed to Virginia née Stephen, but she laughed. When he was conscripted in World War I, he decla ....

Part II of Essay
.... Until Strachey, biographers had kept awestruck distance from their subjects; anything short of adulation was regarded as disrespect Strachey, however, announced that he would write lives with "a brevity which excludes everything that is redundant and nothing that is significant," whether flattering to the subject or not. His intensely personal sketches scandalized stuffier readers but delighted many literati. Strachey's impressionistic portraits occasionally led to inaccuracy, since he selected the facts he liked and had little use for po ....