Volume 53, Number 4 · March 9, 2006
Eminent Anti-Victorian
By Alan Hollinghurst
The Letters of Lytton Strachey
edited by Paul Levy
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 698 pp., $40.00
When Lytton Strachey died, in 1932, it was felt by most of his Bloomsbury friends that his letters 'couldn't be published—they would hurt everybody too much.' They were too candid, too malicious, and they dwelt too much on the incriminating subject of 'buggery.' Virginia Woolf thought this didn't matter ('Oh buggery's exploded—nobody could mind that now'); but actually they did still mind, and the next day she conceded in her diary that 'we cant publish Lytton's letters for 50 years, if at all.'
Review, 3603 words
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