Lytton Strachey

Lytton Strachey (1880–1932) was born in London into a large, prominent Anglo-Indian family and studied history at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he became a founding member of the Bloomsbury Group alongside Virginia Woolf and John Maynard Keynes. Eminent Victorians (1918) — four brief, ironic portraits of Cardinal Manning, Florence Nightingale, Thomas Arnold, and General Gordon that punctured the reverent Victorian biography of its own subjects — made his reputation almost overnight; Queen Victoria (1921), a full-length biography in the same wry but ultimately sympathetic register, followed. Openly homosexual at a time when this was a criminal offense in Britain, he lived for years in a household with the painter Dora Carrington, who remained devoted to him despite his relationships with men. He died at his home in Wiltshire at fifty-one, of what was only correctly diagnosed as stomach cancer after his death.