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The conflict did, however, provide the backdrop for the writing and publication of Lytton Strachey's Eminent Victorians (1918). In his preface, Strachey placed the enterprises of history and literature in opposition, if not in dialogue, as he sought to rescue biography from the forensic hand of the historian and to enliven it with the fanciful touch of the literary critic. Victorian studies experienced one of its multiple births at a moment of cataclysmic destruction and unfathomable loss, with the publication of Strachey's text, released to a world facing ruin.

Arnold \"was a self-righteous blockhead,\" he wrote to his mother while composing the portrait in December 1915, \"but unlike most of his kind, with enough energy and determination in him to do a good deal of damage-as our blessed Public Schools bear witness!\" (qtd. in Holroyd 611)-a view that endorses the most sweeping claims for Arnold's influence. [...]Arnold was acutely aware of the difficulties confronting his large ambitions. In effect, Arnold's authority is structured by a double-bind in which boys must be absolutely individuated, \"free and manly,\" and yet must submit to a community defined against \"that proud notion of personal independence which is neither reasonable nor Christian\" (qtd. in Stanley 67).2 The psychic pressures entailed by this regimen were captured in Arnold's notorious flogging of a boy named Marsh, whom Arnold wrongly suspected of lying. [...]the frequency with which academics over the past forty years have approached Victorian literature and culture as if it were a threat to be disarmed, a subject to be taught so that it might never happen again.

The Stracheys were an exceptionally intelligent and unusual family, prominent in imperial administration, science, and feminism in the nineteenth century, and in the suffrage movement, women’s education, and the bringing of new approaches to sexuality in the twentieth century. The Strachey Family examines the lives of Lytton Strachey, a well-known member of the Bloomsbury set, his nine siblings, and his parents. Richard Strachey worked in India, marrying Jane, the daughter of the Indian Chief Justice, in 1859. A successful imperial couple, they were progressive, following the ideas of Auguste Comte and J. S. Mill, and the teachings of science. Their ten children were born over a period of 27 years and reflect the development and changes in a Victorian society moving to modernity. The richness of their letters provides a fascinating picture of a large, complex, and diverse family where attitudes to the family name, gender tensions, differing views on sexuality, ideas on modernity, and varying degrees of support for feminism all played a part. Dick Strachey, the eldest son, had an unsuccessful military career in India but a loving marriage, whereas Oliver announced to horrified parents that he wished to learn the piano and give music lessons, eventually finding success as a code-breaker in both world wars. Elinor, married to a man of wealth and position, devoted her life exclusively to family and social life, whilst Ralph, Chief Surveyor in India, married a woman who suffered emotional and nervous collapses and was unable to manage a family. Pippa, a full-time suffrage organizer and, in all but name, head of the family, combined the Victorian devoted single daughter with the twentieth century independent career woman, and James, a homosexual in adolescence, married Alix, one of the Bloomsbury cropheads who embraced sexual experimentation, psychoanalysis, and new patterns of domestic life. The remaining children, including Lytton, all had lives no less absorbing, and it is the examination of these lives, as well as relating the issues which they faced to wider society, which make Barbara Caine’s study so captivating and intriguing.

The life and work of John Maynard Keynes should be situated in relation to his membership of the Bloomsbury Group. The members of this circle of friends experimented in their lives and works with a variety of transgressions of contemporary expectations of performances of gender and sexuality. Lytton Strachey's Eminent Victorians (1918) had a significant influence on the way in which Keynes depicted the allied leaders at the Paris Peace Conference in his book The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919). The culture of Bloomsbury queerness played a significant role in the way in which Keynes described and caricatured his political opponents. The huge popularity of Keynes' work suggests that further questions need to be asked concerning the gendered performances of allied leadership in the aftermath of World War One and the popular perceptions of those performances.

McCormack's discussion of Robert Bulwer Lytton's King Poppy (pp. 124- 127) is, with the exception of Herbert Tucker's,2 one of the very few observations on Lytton's poem. The poem was probably in private circulation prior to its 1892 publication with a frontispiece and decorative title page design by Edward Burne-Jones. Mark Samuels Lasner kindly points out in an email to the present author on March 9, 2023, that \"there is a copy\" of King Poppy at the University of Delaware Library, Museums and Press \"also from the [Lohf] collection presented by Lady Lytton to Burne Jones.\"

Lytton Strachey and Josep Pla are authors with distinct creative personalities, but also with important points of contact. Pla felt a great admiration for the English writer, founder of the so-called New Biography. Strachey renewed the genre thanks to his critical eye and his literary instinct, attentive to detail, to synthesis, to irony. The narrative effectiveness of his texts and their psychological penetration shortened the distances between biography and novel. All these qualities are also present in the work of Josep Pla. When Pla read Strachey's work and that of the other New Biography authors, he was a young writer who had already decided the direction that his work should take: the memoirs. In his desire to leave a record of his time, biographies had already begun to play an important role, which would grow in relevance throughout his writing career. It seems reasonable to think that the reading of Strachey's work and that of the other New Biography authors could offer Pla confirmation in his chosen literary option as well as encouragement throughout his years of dedication to the biographical genre.

Like many biographies of women, Nightingale's relies on the anecdote of childhood promise, specifically, her preternatural skill in repairing a dog or a doll.5 It may seem far-fetched to place the literary landmark Eminent Victorians alongside Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls.6 Yet Strachey and later commentators uneasily dismiss the traces of popular Nightingales that surface in Eminent Victorians, a highbrow version of collective biography. On the contrary, Strachey asserts that \"a Demon possessed her\" (97). [...]she was more interesting and less agreeable than the legend.7 Strachey essentially makes such claims for all four sexually repressed, indomitable characters, as if he is rescuing his subjects from their portrayals in self-help books, children's stories, or family-sponsored hagiography. [...]when Strachey calls Nightingale \"the founder of modern nursing\" (130), he explains the low status of her chosen career with this standard Dickensian reference: \"a 'nurse' meant then a coarse old woman, always ignorant, usually dirty, often brutal, a Mrs. Gamp, in bunched-up sordid garments, tippling at the brandy bottle or indulging in worse irregularities\" (Strachey 99). Relative stature can be measured by tables of contents in CBW; thus, Joan of Arc, the most frequent subject, appears in sixty-eight books; Queen Victoria and Nightingale, each in sixty-one, well ahead of many queens or biblical women (Mary Queen of Scots, forty-seven; Deborah, forty-two).