Paul Levy is a Strachey Trustee and co-executor of Lytton Strachey's literary estate.He is the author of Moore: G.E.Moore and the Cambridge Apostles and edited Lytton Strachey: The Really Interesting Question and (with Michael Holroyd) The Shorter Strachey. He has also written and edited several books on food and wine including The Penguin Book of Food and Drink
Lytton Strachey (1880-1932) is known as an imaginative biographer (e.g., Eminent Victorians) and a prominent member of the Bloomsbury group. The 1995 movie Carrington highlighted his complex relationship with painter Dora Carrington, and Michael Holroyd's detailed two-volume Lytton Strachey: The New Biography (1968) provides all the critical details about the author's life. But often the letters of a literary figure create the most multifaceted and vivid portrait, and that is certainly the case with this one-volume compilation, edited by Strachey trustee Levy (Moore: G.E. Moore and the Cambridge Apostles). Hundreds of Strachey's letters to such figures as Carrington, Virginia and Leonard Woolf, John Maynard Keynes, E.M. Forster, and T.S. Eliot are included, as are letters to family members and both male and female lovers. Indiscretions, complete candor, and scatological language mark Strachey's style, as does a sense of English history in the first third of the 20th century. Historical and biographical notes preface many of the letters, and the index, which pinpoints correspondence from specific individuals, is useful for readers who might not wish to read every letter. Recommended for upper-division and graduate academic collections as well as for larger public library centers.-Morris Hounion, New York City Technical Coll. Lib., CUNY Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.
A complete edition of Lytton Strachey's letters would total six volumes, testament to the ferocious epistolary energy of the author of the classic Eminent Victorians, which ridiculed the hapless inhabitants of that era as priggish, canting hypocrites and revolutionized the biographical form. Levy, a Strachey trustee and editor of Lytton Strachey: The Really Interesting Question, has selected the best of them, no easy task given that letter writing was Strachey's natural mode of communication. As a pivotal member of the Bloomsbury group-whose luminaries included Virginia Woolf and John Maynard Keynes-Strachey's interests delved deep and spanned wide, encompassing theater, painting, history, literature, music, modernism, waspish gossip-and sex, including some forms still considered shocking even in our jaded day. For the conflicted Strachey (1880-1932)-a radical member of the upper-class, a hypochondriac who died at 51 of an undiagnosed cancer, a sentimental cynic, a masochist who hurt others by telling them painful truths, a homosexual who had affairs with women-the serious was trivial, the trivial, serious; and he never could decide whether, as he remarked to his brother James, "I'm an utter fool, a genius, or an ordinary person." As Levy's careful, sensitive volume demonstrates, he was all three-and many more. (Dec.) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.
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