Lytton Strachey was born on March 1, 1880, in Clapham, London, the eleventh of thirteen children born to an upper-middle class family. Strachey was educated in private schools and by tutors until he attended Trinity College, Cambridge in 1899. At Cambridge, he became a member of a group called The Apostles which included the novelist E. M. Forster and literary critic Leonard Woolf. The Apostles rejected conventional morality and cultivated the pleasures of the senses and the aesthetic appreciation of art. In this group, Strachey was able to give expression to his homosexuality.

Strachey obtained a degree in History from Trinity College in 1903, although the following year he failed to win the fellowship he desired when his dissertation on the British statesman Warren Hastings was rejected. Strachey then returned to London where he became part of the Bloomsbury Group, a group of unconventional intellectuals that included Virginia Woolf and...