The Letters of Lytton Strachey
by Lytton Strachey, Paul Levy
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Book Summary Information
Author: Lytton Strachey, Paul LevyEdition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2005-11-29
ISBN: 0374258546
Number of pages: 720
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Book Reviews of The Letters of Lytton Strachey
Book Review: Fascinating correspondence by one of Bloomsbury's most eloquent and interesting members
Summary: 5 Stars
These letters by Lytton Strachey, writer and member of the Bloomsbury group of artists, reveal much about the man, the time in which he lived, and the circle of artists with which he surrounded himself. I've read several reviews about this book in which Strachey is described as an old maid of a man spending his time doing nothing but reading books and complaining about his health. However, this collection of his personal correspondence reveals him to be much more complex than that.
In several ways he seems to be a very tragic figure. For one, he is deeply in love with someone with whom, due to his homosexuality, he will never be sexually compatible - Dora Carrington - and he is sexually compatible with a series of people with whom the love part of the relationship never quite comes off. Although his many letters to Carrington often talk about his travels and the practical matters of the household that they shared for 15 years, there are at least three or four that are genuine love letters uncomparable to any that he wrote to any of his lovers, including Roger Senhouse, with whom he was involved the last six or so years of his life.
The other great tragedy of Strachey's life was the misdiagnosis of his final illness, a stomach cancer that grew until it ultimately perforated his colon and killed him in 1932. According to his letters, he began to have signs of this illness starting in 1929, but his various physicians always attributed his vague symptoms to a series of minor ailments, usually prescribing such things as suppositories and doing nothing more to properly diagnose and treat the problem. Strachey did suffer bouts of illness throughout his life, and perhaps the fact that he had never suffered from anything serious before caused his physicians to not take him seriously when he did finally become gravely ill.
Strachey is at his best in his correspondence when he is pouring out his heart about something for which he cares deeply. For example, he writes some very elegant prose on his attitudes toward the first World War, why he was against it, and why he was willing to go to jail rather than serve its cause. I only wish that more of his correspondence had been about current events in England during his lifetime. His approach to the whole matter of refusing to serve in the war effort was a risky one, since he refused to be dishonest and just say that he was against all wars - he wasn't. He was simply adamantly opposed to this one particular war. On top of that, he was asking for a medical exemption based on his poor health that would find him completely unfit for service, even a desk job on the home front. Miraculously, he pulls this off and is found totally medically unfit, although the exact diagnosis of the military doctors is not given in his correspondence. This leads to one of the great conundrums of Strachey's life - how could someone who claimed to be so ill and who also convinced the military of this manage to travel throughout Europe as he often did and even embark on strenuous walking tours such as the one he took with Dora Carrington in Wales the same year he was exempted from military service?
Strachey has an intriguing and very often mischievous writing style whether he is gossiping about the personal lives of the other members of Bloomsbury, talking about his own work and his feelings toward its quality, or giving his opinion about the artistic works of the other members of Bloomsbury. If you are the least bit interested in the Bloomsbury group of artists, about Lytton Strachey himself, or the times in which Strachey lived, I highly recommend this collection of letters.
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