Volume 10, Number 11 · June 6, 1968
A Very Queer Gentleman
By Noel Annan
Lytton Strachey, Vol. 1, The Unknown Years 1880-1910, Vol. 2, The Years of Achievement, 1910-1932
by Michael Holroyd
Holt, Rinehart & Winston, Vol. 1, 474, Vol. 2, 754 pp., $29.95 the set
Lytton Strachey is a deceptive figure. Portraits and photographs depict him as a withdrawn, pallid creature, hiding behind a beard and peering out at an alien world, etiolated, passive, blank. The reality was different. He possessed a will of iron, a character so strong and so entirely self-confident of his capacity to sit in judgment upon society that he was able to impose his vision of what the world was like upon a generation younger than his with hardly a gesture toward the prejudices and received views of his times. He might have been describing himself when he wrote of Florence Nightingale that her parents had hatched not a swan but an eagle.
Review, 4784 words
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