Critical analysis of FLorence DOCX

Title	Critical analysis of FLorence
Author	Priyanka Raj
Pages	4
File Size	16.2 KB
File Type	DOCX
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Summary

Description

In Eminent Victorians (1918), Lytton Strachey examined the lives of four famous English individuals from the Victorian Era and found that they were not quite what previous biographies and popular legend had made them out to be. The four in question were Cardinal Manning, the leader of England's Roman Catholic community; Florence Nightingale, the nurse; Thomas Arnold, the educational reformer; and General Charles George Gordon, a soldier and adventurer. Strachey sought a new approach to biography. The typical, sprawling two-volume Victorian biography presented its subject in the best possible light, ignoring any aspects of the life that might tarnish the person's achievements. Strachey determined that these large and tedious volumes, full of what he called "ill-digested masses of material," did a disservice to the art of biography. In contrast, he wrote short, pithy, artful biographies that told the truth about the subjects as Strachey understood it. The result, in Eminent Victorians, is a series of radical reinterpretations. Cardinal Manning is presented as a scheming, ambitious man rather than a pious representative of God. Florence Nightingale, although Strachey does not devalue her astonishing achievements, is presented as a woman maniacally obsessed with work, whose personality was acerbic rather than saintly. Strachey's Arnold, the headmaster of Rugby School, is little more than a pompous, pedantic fool. The portrait of Gordon is the most complex of the four, showing a man who was driven to his demise by the contradictions in his own personality and the vacillation of the British government. The present text is a part of the famous book Eminent Victorians (1918) written by Lytton Strachey. Strachey was one of the influential members of Bloomsbury Group, a loosely associated group of English writers, intellectuals, philosophers and artists who shared and propagated a common view of life in the early 20th century England. They stood apart from the conventional norms, bourgeois values and Victorian morality and adopted a more liberal way of life with a focus on personal relationships and individual pleasure. As a member of this society, Lytton Strachey, a biographer and literary critic, took an unconventional attitude to writing biography. He revolutionized and even deconstructed the concept as well as technique of writing biography in Eminent Victorians. In November 1912 he wrote to Virginia Woolf that their Victorian predecessors "seem to me a set of mouth bungled hypocrites." He demystified several Victorian icons like Cardinal Manning, Florence Nightingale, Thomas Arnold and General Gordon who were standing on the ivory tower of glory. He stripped them of their aura associated with them to present a realistic picture of...