Queen Victoria

Lytton Strachey was a British writer and critic. A founder member of the Bloomsbury Group and author of Eminent Victorians, he is best known for establishing a new form of biography in which psychological insight and sympathy are combined with irreverence and wit. His biography Queen Victoria was awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. Strachey's theory of biography was now fully developed and mature. He was greatly influenced by Dostoyevsky, whose novels Strachey had been reading and reviewing as they appeared in Constance Garnett's translations. Also the influence of Freud would be important on Strachey's later works, most notably on Elizabeth and Essex. This study of the childhood, marriage, and reign of England's beloved queen reveals a tender but determined woman. Her short life had hardly been a happy one. By nature impulsive, capricious, and vehement, she had always longed for liberty; and she had never possessed it.