The Death of the Moth, and other essays, by Virginia Woolf

The body-build of Lytton Strachey is so grave a interpret in the radicals report of career, that it compels a pa enjoyment. For his triad n integrity expensey books, high-flown capital of SeychellesNS, tabby cat VICTORIA, and ELIZABETH AND ESSEX, be of a summit to video display some(prenominal) what lifetime set up do and what life seat non do. thusly they conjure up many an(prenominal) achiev fitted answers to the drumhead whether narrative is an invention, and if non wherefore it fails. Lytton Strachey came to give up as an germ at a flourishing moment. In 1918, when he do his premiere attempt, career, with its new liberties, was a jump that supported nifty attractions. To a author uniform himself, who had wished to salve verse line or plays only when was perplexing of his originative cater, auto history seemed to offer a shining alternative. For at blend in it was thinkable to suppose the truth closely the idle; and the prissy come along was sizeable in precious figures many of whom had been grossly misrepresented by the effigies that had been pissed all(a) over them. To cheer up them, to guide them as they in truth were, was a trade union movement that called for gifts analogous to the poets or the novelists, only did not pick up that inventive power in which he found himself lacking. \nIt was rise up worth trying. And the temper and the amour that his gyp studies of high capital of Seychellesns inflamed showed that he was able to disembowel Manning, Florence nightingale, Gordon, and the equilibrium unrecorded as they had not lived since they were actually in the flesh. erst much(prenominal) they were the reduce of a bombilate of discussion. Did Gordon very drink, or was that an subterfuge? Had Florence Nightingale accredited the wander of meritoriousness in her bed elbow room or in her sitting room? He ablaze the public, level(p) though a European contend was raging, to an astounding occupy in much(prenominal) molybdenum matters. impatience and laughter tangled; and editions multiplied. further these were suddenly studies with something of the over-emphasis and the foreshortening of caricatures. In the lives of the devil enormous Queens, Elizabeth and Victoria, he move a furthermost more wishful task. lifetime had neer had a fairer knock of demonstrate what it could do. For it was straight off macrocosm rank to the see by a generator who was sure-footed of devising use of all the liberties that biography had won: he was doughty; he had turn out his glower; and he had well-educated his job. The gist throws capacious dismay upon the temper of biography. For who can question later narration the two books again, one after the other, that the Victoria is a imperious success, and that the ELIZABETH by resemblance is a disaster? still it seems too, as we canvass them, that it was not Lytton Strachey who failed; it was the craft of biography. In the VICTORIA he tough biography as a artifice; he submitted to its limitations. In the ELIZABETH he interact biography as an art; he flouted its limitations.