Lytton Strachey

A current and common reading of Virginia Woolf’s experimental novel The Waves places the character of Bernard against his friends as a dominating force. The novel is noted for its pluralism. The six speaking characters in The Waves express themselves through short monologues, sharing nearly equal space with one another until the concluding section. It is over the final forty-four pages of the novel that Bernard is fully emphasized, the voices of Louis, Rhoda, Jinny, Neville, and Susan giving way to his alone. It is this moment Gabrielle McIntire explores in her essay “Heteroglossia, Monologism, and Fascism: Bernard reads The Waves,” arguing for an understanding of both Bernard and the novel that is deeply influenced by Woolf’s anti-fascist sentiment. McIntire pieces together an understanding of Bernard as domineering, with a drive toward controlling and subsuming methods of expression. Bernard concludes The Waves with a singular and summarizing internal monologue. His friends, while physically absent, are fully realized in Bernard’s memories of their childhood together. Although his aptitude for storytelling is present throughout the entire text, in this last section of speech Bernard overcomes the established format of the novel, acting as the previously absent narrator. McIntire indicates this collapse of plurality as at once both enticing and dangerous, a synthesis of creative chaos into a single point of view. The Waves is certainly a novel in tension, and McIntire’s…

In Lytton Strachey’s essay on the life of Florence Nightingale, he uses imagery and diction to tear down the traditional view of the founder of modern nursing science. He then replaces this romanticised view of Nightingale with the historical, less known view of her life. Strachey uses the first paragraph of his essay to describe this romanticised view of Nightingale’s life, of the “saintly, self-sacrificing woman,”, claiming that “the truth was different.”. Strachey follows this by shocking the…

The two were part of the well-known Bloomsbury Group, and their home in Charleston as well as their work on the Church constitute the remaining evidence of the group's involvement with each other outside of London. Grant's painting Christ in Glory sits above the Berwick altar, demonstrating how the Bloomsbury Group took traditional Victorian values and flipped them on their heads by his extraordinary use of color and the inclusion of lay people in the piece. The presence of a multitude of easily…

homosexuality was recognised, but not tolerated and was considered shameful. Lesbianism was a concept that many Victorians could not grasp, as it involved no penetration, and was perceived as having no usefulness as the female being held no sexual desire. The pervading myth was that the Victorians viewed ‘marital sexuality’, congress between a man and a woman, as central in importance as it defined the primacy of marriage and its value in society. The Victorians also valued self-control and…

John Maynard Keynes is reflected as one of the prime economists of all time. Keynes was born in Cambridge, England. He was raised in life full of academic achievement. John Neville Keynes, his father, was a well-known economist and registrar at Cambridge University. His mother, Florence Ada Keynes, was a writer and an advocate for social welfare. She became the first female mayor of Cambridge. From 1897 to 1902, Keynes attended Eton, and he later entered King’s College on scholarship. “The…

Her grandfather was Victorian historian Sir James Stephen, Regis professor of modern history at Cambridge and her father was Leslie Stephen, the first editor of The Dictionary of National Biography. Asides from these prestigious connections Woolf was also friends with,and briefly engaged to, Lytton Strachey, who was a highly unorthodox biographer. It is reasonable to assume that all of these factors had an influence on the young Virgina Stephen; perhaps none more so than her father, who was a…

An air of gloominess surrounds the Middle Ages, from the weariness of everyday people’s lives, to the battles and wars fought by knights. ”There is something dark and wintry about the atmosphere of the later Middle Ages”-Lytton Strachey. This period, after the fall of the western Roman Empire and before the Renaissance, was when no progress was made in culture or education because of the lack of a central government. This crisis in the government caused people to focus their attention on…

alarming collapse she was briefly. She spent time at her friend Violet Dickinson house, at her aunt Caroline’s house including his nephew and biographer, Quentin Bell her breakdown subsequent depressive periods. Also, influenced the sexual abuse which she and her sister Vanessa subjected their brother George and Gerald Duckworth recalls in her autobiographical essays A Sketch of the Past 22 Hyde Park Gate. Wool was plagued periodic mood swings. She spent three years in Burley House. A private…