![]() ![]() ![]() After his research into the life of Cardinal Manning, he realised he would have difficulty managing twelve lives. In November 1912, he wrote to Virginia Woolf that their Victorian predecessors "seem to me a set of mouth bungled hypocrites". He went to live in the country at East Ilsley and started work on a book then called Victorian Silhouettes, containing miniature biographies of a dozen notable Victorian personalities. ![]() Strachey developed the idea for Eminent Victorians in 1912, when he was living on occasional journalism and writing dilettante plays and verse for his Bloomsbury friends. The book made Strachey's name and placed him firmly in the top rank of biographers. While Nightingale is actually praised and her reputation enhanced, the book shows its other subjects in a less-than-flattering light, for instance, the intrigues of Cardinal Manning against Cardinal Newman. Its fame rests on the irreverence and wit Strachey brought to bear on three men and a woman who had, until then, been regarded as heroes: Cardinal Manning, Florence Nightingale, Thomas Arnold and General Charles Gordon. Eminent Victorians is a book by Lytton Strachey (one of the older members of the Bloomsbury Group), first published in 1918, and consisting of biographies of four leading figures from the Victorian era. ![]()
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