- Born
- 1 March 1880London, England
- Died
- 21 January 1932Ham, Wiltshire, England · aged 51
Lytton Strachey
The witty founder of modern biography was at the heart of the Bloomsbury Group – and lived in an unconventional household with a painter who loved him.
Lytton Strachey was one of thirteen children of a general and a suffragist. At Cambridge he belonged to the secret debating society of the “Apostles” and became friends with John Maynard Keynes, E. M. Forster and Leonard Woolf. In London he was one of the founders of the Bloomsbury Group, the circle of writers and artists around Virginia Woolf.
His book “Eminent Victorians” (1918) revolutionised biography: instead of reverent portraits, he wrote ironic, psychologically sharp sketches of four Victorian heroes. His biography “Queen Victoria” (1921) was a bestseller. In the First World War he refused military service as a conscientious objector.
Strachey loved men and was open about it among his friends; he had affairs with, among others, the painter Duncan Grant and later Roger Senhouse. At the same time he lived for many years with the painter Dora Carrington, who loved him deeply, and her husband Ralph Partridge, whom Strachey loved – an arrangement that seemed scandalous to many.
He died of stomach cancer in 1932 at their country house, Ham Spray, aged 51.