Queen Victoria

Lytton Strachey, as all readers of Eminent Victorians know, belongs with Taine and Macaulay in that small class of historians who are also artists. In the vivid and beautiful pages of "Queen Victoria" one sees the Eighteenth Century of England with its cynicism, elegance and philosophy fade out into the dreary respectability and moral timidity of the Nineteenth. And one sees it from the standpoint of one of the chief actors, a forceful and unintelligent German woman who uncomprehendingly presides over wars and political changes and gives her name to an era whose great movements mean nothing to her. For anything as fine as the historic irony of this book one must to go Renan.

Originally published in 1921, "Queen Victoria" created a new and insistent appetite for a new and strangely delightful literary experience, for excepting Anatole France it is likely there was no living writer whose public was so avid and insatiable as Lytton Strachey's.