The Letters of Lytton Strachey

This new selection of Strachey's letters is a whole new chapter in the history of the last century. Lytton Strachey (1880-1932) is one of the key figures in the cultural life of twentieth century Britain and his letters are a literary treasure-trove of the man and his world, as well as a record of the startling and poignant love-affair between him and the painter Dora Carrington. The breadth of his correspondence is breathtaking, going from precocious childhood letters to letters to Leonard and Virginia Woolf, Maynard Keynes and other members of the Bloomsbury Group to love letters to Duncan Grant and Carrington. The thousands of letters he wrote retain their vitality to this day discussing changes in morals, the writing of history, literature and philosophy, politics, war and peace and the advent of modernism. As an historian and biographer he was largely responsible for our own view that the Victorians were priggish; he was openly homosexual, lived in a menage a trois with Ralph Partridge and Carrington.