Eminent Victorians

Lytton Strachey (Литтон Стрэчи)

английский

Penguin Books

Четыре биографических эссе о выдающихся викторианцах.

В книгу вошли биографические исследования Флоренс Найтингейл, доктора Т.Арнолда, кардинала Маннинга и генерала Ч.Гордона.

Фактически, только эссе по Кардиналу Мэннингу и доктору Арнольду являются серьезными, остальные же скорее по мативам правды, нежеле на основе фактов.

Книгу отличают блестящий стиль и, пожалуй, самое удачное в английской литературе использование юмора в области написания биографий.

`Eminent Victorians is the work of a great anarch, a revolutionary textbook on bourgeois society written in the language through which the bourgeois ear could be lulled and beguiled, the Mandarin style` - Cyril Connolly in Enemies o> Promise

Lytton Strachey`s desire `to lay bare the tacts ... as I understand them, dispassionately, impartially, and without ulterior intentions`, gave him, in an age of panegyric, the reputation of an iconoclast. In his famous study of four Victorian figures, in fact, only the essays on Cardinal Manning and Dr Arnold are consistently severe: his portrait of Florence Nightingale, though it exploded the fable of the Lady of the Lamp, is often admiring, and the tragedy of General Gordon is retailed with a note of tenderness.

If these studies, with their free and expressive lines, can be seen as, in the best sense, caricatures, yet (as Michael Holroyd has written in his major biography of Strachey): `Eminent Victorians marked ... the initial stage in a more benign treatment of the Victorian age.`