Ah, la vie!

Ruth Bernard Yeazell

  • The Letters of Lytton Strachey edited by Paul Levy
    Viking, 698 pp, £30.00, March 2005, ISBN 0 670 89112 6

Lytton Strachey loved reading letters, including the published kind, but after glancing at a few sentences of George Meredith’s correspondence in 1912, he felt ‘so nauseated’, he told Virginia Woolf, that he shut the book at once:

Is it prejudice, do you think, that makes us hate the Victorians, or is it the truth of the case? They seem to me to be a set of mouthing bungling hypocrites; but perhaps really there is a baroque charm about them which will be discovered by our great-great-grandchildren, as we have discovered the charm of Donne, who seemed intolerable to the 18th century. Only I don’t believe it.

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[*] A paperback edition to be published in March will include corrections, revisions and new material.