The Letters of Lytton Strachey - Hardcover

Strachey, Lytton; Levy, Paul; Marcus, Penelope

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0374258546 ISBN 13: 9780374258542

Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux, 2005

Synopsis

The correspondence of one of the twentieth century's most important literary figures includes letters to Virginia Woolf, Maynard Keynes, Dora Carrington, Duncan Grant, and others.

About this title

Review:

Astonishingly ... this seems to be the first occasion on which Lytton Strachey's letters have been brought together in print. -- The Spectator 19 March 2005 by Philip Hensher

His gossip is priceless. No one can pinpoint human failure, pretension or pomposity more brilliantly than Strachey. -- Daily Telegraph 26 March 2005 by Hilary Spurling

His sex life...as Paul Levy warns in his excellent introduction, "will startle even those who regard themselves as unshockable." -- Evening Standard 18 April 2005 by Claire Harman

Strachey ...prophesied...the literature of the future ... "indecent, amusing, and romantic, and even written well." Just like these wonderful letters. -- Sunday Times 27 March 2005 by Mark Bostridge

The letters document a life of almost infinite variety, not least in sexual matters. -- The Week 2 April 2005 Book of the Week

From the Author:

Strachey wrote at least six times the number of letters included in this selection, and it took me about five years to choose the letters included, and to annotate them. His output of letters was similar to that of one of his favourite correspondents, Virginia Woolf, and this edition includes, for the first time, all his letters to her, complete and unexpurgated. I have also included every letter of which I am aware that deals with or criticises the literary work of his friends such as T.S. Eliot, Leonard Woolf, E.M. Forster, G.E, Moore, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Bertrand Russell, Roger Fry, Clive Bell and Rupert Brooke. His relations with John Maynard Keynes, Duncan Grant and other members of the Bloomsbury Group are covered as throughly as space allowed, and his love affair with the painter, Carrington is given the same prominence it had in their lives. Though written a long time ago, some of these letters still have the power to shock. Most of them are amusing, and none is dull.
The Lytton Strachey who emerges from these letters is very much the man described in Michael Holroyd's heroic biography, though with an added poignancy conveyed by his own words. His misogyny, occasional racial prejudice and unthinking anti-Semitism are not covered up in the editing. Yet here he appears a more radical figure - a sexual, political and cultural radical, much in advance of his own age and its mores.

About this edition

• Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 0374258546
• ISBN 13: 9780374258542
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 698