Lytton Strachey : l’historien intime de deux reines

Abstract

The British writer Lytton Strachey (1880-1932) wrote biographies of the two most eminent Queens of England : Queen Victoria (1921) and Elizabeth and Essex (1928). The two books made him a very famous historian. However, he would personally have preferred to be admired for his poetry or his plays, for he was a very gifted literary author. Nevertheless many of Strachey’s readers have appreciated his conception of biography, as a means of personal confession while studying the destiny of a public figure. Indeed the Stracheyan way of life, free from Victorian moral standards and guided by the rules of the Bloomsbury group, inspired his story of Victoria and Elizabeth. Both Queens at the end of their lives and at the height of their power carried on strange love affairs : Victoria with her Scottish gillie and Elizabeth with the Earl of Essex, thirty years her younger. In fact, both romances subtly reflect Strachey’s own love affairs. He was himself engaged in a kind of common life with Dora Carrington – the painter, thirteen years younger than him, with whom he was not sexually involved – while he engaged in numerous homosexual love affairs.