Subjects
Unpublished Works of Lytton Strachey:
Early Papers
Editor: Todd Avery
The Pickering Masters
978 1 84893 141 1: 234x156mm: £100.00/$180.00
A core member of the Bloomsbury Group, Lytton Strachey (1880–1932) is recognized for his radical influence on the new school of psychological biography. This volume collects for the first time Strachey’s previously unpublished essays, dialogues and stories. The first section includes all fifteen of Strachey’s Discussion Society papers from his time at Cambridge; products of his membership in the Midnight Society, the Sunday Essay Society and the Apostles. Strachey was obsessed with conversation as a means to exploring ideas – the dialogues presented in the second section are satirical and exist in what appears to be a finished form. The third and final section gathers five fascinating stories from a genre that Strachey often practiced but in which he never published.
Strachey’s unpublished writing offers vital and surprising new insights into his life and work. In particular, the stories reveal a greater engagement with issues of morality than previously considered and demonstrate the author’s spiritual and emotional awakening. His exploration of Modernist aesthetical, ethical and social issues means that this edition will be invaluable to scholars of Modernism and the Bloomsbury Group. Strachey also inspired the development of the academic field of Victorian studies and thus researchers of Victorianism will also find much of interest in these writings.
These previously unpublished materials are taken from the Strachey Papers at the British Library, and published at the behest of the Strachey Trust and the Society of Authors.
- Makes available for the first time significant unpublished works
- Contextualizes the material both bibliographically and thematically
- Full scholarly apparatus including an extensive introduction, bibliography and index
Sample pages
Contents
Cambridge Society Papers
A Sermon Preached before the Midnight Society
Conversation and Conversations
Christ or Caliban?
The Colloquies of Senrab
Is Death Desirable?
Dignity, Romance, or Vegetarianism?
Th e Historian of the Future
Should We Have Elected Conybeare?
Shall We Be Missionaries?
The Ethics of the Gospels
Shall We Go the Whole Hog?
When Is a Drama not a Drama?
Was Diotima Right?
Do Two and Two Make Five?
Ought Art to Be Always Beautiful?
Shakespeare and the Musical Glasses (fragment)
and Art Has No Concern with Morals (fragment)
Dialogues
Julius Caesar and Lord Salisbury
Cleopatra and Mrs. Humphry Ward
Salter and Cleopatra. An Imaginary Conversation
Catullus and Lord Tennyson
Boccaccio and General Lee
Headmaster and Parent (fragment)
Gibbon, Johnson, and Adam Smith
Good God
Stories
The Decline and Fall of Little Red Riding Hood
The Story of A and B
Tragedy
Interesting Letter from Madame La Comtesse de — to Lady X
Letter. From an Inhabitant of another World