SOURCE: "Racine," in Books and Characters: French & English, Chatto and Windus, 1922, pp. 3-24.

Strachey was an early twentieth-century English biographer, critic, essayist, and short story writer. He is best known for his biographies Eminent Victorians (1918), Queen Victoria (1921), and Elizabeth and Essex: A Tragic History (1928). According to P. Mansell Jones, translator of Eugène Vinaver 's Racine and Poetic Tragedy (1955), "Curiosity about Racine was considerably stimulated in Anglo-Saxon countries by the publication of Lytton Strachey's essay [in Books and Characters in 1922." In the following excerpt from that essay, originally published in the New Quarterly in 1908, Strachey summarizes the difficulty of fixing Racine's place among the world's poets, and comments upon the great emotional power of his dramas.]

It is difficult to 'place' Racine among the poets. He has affinities with many; but likenesses to few. To balance him rigorously against any other—to ask whether he is better or...