Lytton Strachey, critic and biographer, created a new kind of biography. His studies of Queen Elizabeth and Queen Victoria, powerful and dramatic, though relatively conventional, are excellent biographies, but his Eminent Victorians, published in 1918, established his reputation as a revisionist of the Victorian public figures he loved to loathe and of the idea of biography itself. Though Strachey never wrote a full-length biography of a literary figure, his biographies represent a major influence on the writing of biography in general and literary biography in particular. Because Strachey's methods and approach, especially in Eminent Victorians, often rely on psychological insights that are finally unverifiable, few modern biographers adopt his method completely. His influence does, however, have the effect of liberating the biographer from the enslavement of data, of making more room for the flashes of insight that illuminate without relying on strict proof. Equipped with psychological acuity, and bearing a sharp cynicism deepened by his disillusionment over World War I, Strachey, in writing Eminent Victorians, invented a novel method of short biography that, rather than insisting on careful documentation and scrupulous source hunting, thrives on its author's subjective response to his subject.
