Michael Holroyd

Michael Holroyd has written biographies of Lytton Strachey, Augustus John and Hugh Kingsmill, and edited The Genius of Shaw. A Strange Eventful History, about Ellen Terry, is out in paperback.

Letter
John Pemble invites us to find ‘remarkable’ Lytton Strachey’s admiration for W.S. Gilbert, ‘the most eminently Victorian of them all’, after he saw a production of Iolanthe in 1907 (LRB, 16 June). ‘It’s impossible to believe that a lord chancellor in love with a fairy can be anything but ridiculous,’ Strachey wrote that year to Leonard Woolf in a letter quoted by Pemble, ‘but one...

A Tale of Three Novels: Violet Trefusis

Michael Holroyd, 11 February 2010

Violet Trefusis was born on 6 June 1894, the elder daughter of Alice Keppel, a famously discreet mistress of the future Edward VII. ‘I wonder if I shall ever squeeze as much romance into my life as she has had in hers,’ Violet wrote in the summer of 1918 to Vita Sackville-West. She had begun to squeeze a very indiscreet romance with Vita into her own life. The girls’ passion...

Letter

Make-Believe

1 January 2009

In his review of my book A Strange Eventful History, David Edgar credits me with having pioneered the use of fiction in biography (LRB, 1 January). But though I welcome many biographical experiments (and enjoyed the imaginary conversations in Peter Ackroyd’s Dickens), I do not myself attempt to fictionalise my characters. I speculate, paraphrase, parody and employ some novelistic narrative techniques....

Diary: Travails with My Aunt

Michael Holroyd, 7 March 1996

When people ask me who I am writing about, I tell them it’s my aunt.

Letter

Morgie

13 May 1993

The naming of biographical subjects, which has been raised by Miranda Seymour and Frank Kermode (Letters, 27 May and Letters, 24 June), partly depends upon the context in which their names appear. I wrote about ‘Lytton’ because that was how all his friends referred to him, and I wanted to integrate their references into my narrative. ‘Lytton’ was also helpful in distinguishing him early on...

One’s Self-Washed Drawers: Ida John

Rosemary Hill, 29 June 2017

She might have been happy enough had not her ‘beautiful warm face’ caught the eye of Augustus John. Then she knew what it was to have a grand passion and to be on the horns of a dilemma.

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Exit Humbug: Theatrical Families

David Edgar, 1 January 2009

Ellen Terry was the youngest daughter of two touring players, and began her own stage career at the age of six. Ten years later, she married a painter three times her age; they separated within...

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Charging Downhill: Michael Holroyd

Frank Kermode, 28 October 1999

When he came to write his autobiography, the biographer Michael Holroyd decided to restrict himself to what he calls ‘a good walk-on part’, assigning the leading roles to his family....

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After-Lives

John Sutherland, 5 November 1992

A man of many literary parts, Ian Hamilton came to biography late and triumphantly with his life of the dead but still warm Robert Lowell. Riding high, he went on to attempt an unauthorised life...

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Molly’s Methuselah

Frank Kermode, 26 September 1991

At the beginning of Mr Holroyd’s third volume Shaw, now 62, is expressing strong views, sensible but not attended to, on the conduct of the nation’s affairs in a difficult postwar...

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Baby Face

John Bayley, 24 May 1990

Who said of whom: ‘I have talent but he has genius’? Evelyn Waugh had been reading Futility, which first came out in 1922, but his favourite Gerhardie novel was to be Jazz and Jasper....

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Power-Seeker

Frank Kermode, 12 October 1989

Having followed Shaw on a largely unsuccessful pursuit of love in Volume I, Mr Holroyd in his second instalment sets him off on what turns out to be an equally frustrated pursuit of power. It may...

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Georgian eyes are smiling

Frank Kermode, 15 September 1988

There were already good biographies of Shaw, notably those of Frank Harris and Hesketh Pearson, both of whom knew Shaw and had the benefit of his energetic interventions. Pearson in particular...

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Is it a crime?

P.N. Furbank, 6 June 1985

As is well known, there is a curious association between bibliography and crime. It has something to do with a relationship to books as physical objects, and something to do with the fact that...

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Posterity

Frank Kermode, 2 April 1981

Gerhardie is one of those writers who are periodically rescued from near-oblivion. In 1947, a temporary revival of interest was brought about by the publication of a ‘Uniform Edition’...

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It is odd that Lytton Strachey did not manage to strike up much fellow-feeling for Prospero. In an essay of 1904 on Shakespeare’s final period we find the puncturing remark...

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