Lytton Strachey has 4 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 4 narrators, with an average listener rating of 5★ across 1 ratings. The most-rated is Eminent Victorians.
Eminent Victorians
Summary
When Lytton Strachey published Emininent Victorians, he took the general perception of the Victorian age among English-speaking readers and turned it upside-down. Four of the most eminent and idealized heroic figures of the Victorian age came under his witty and unsparing gaze and emerged, astonishingly enough, as human beings. His study of one of the most revered prelates in England, Cardinal Manning, reveals a profound and courageous religious mind combined with the conniving and ruthless soul of a born politician. His dissection of the life of Florence Nightingale shows her both as the Lady of the Lamp and as a woman of steely backbone and adamantine determination, who not only cared for wounded and sick soldiers with complete dedication and solicitude, but who wreaked holy hell on any bureaucrat or governmental office that tried to get in her way. When Strachey is finished with Dr. Arnold, we understand him as a revolutionary reformer of English education and as a first-rate prig. And when Strachey finishes leading us through the life of General George Gordon, we come away having known him both as a man of extraordinary courage and as a near-lunatic. Fascinating, witty, insightful and provoking, these four biographical studies single-handedly revived the art of biography in the English language.
Public Domain (P)2012 Robert Bethune
Queen Victoria
Summary
“The girl, the wife, the aged woman, were the same: vitality, conscientiousness, pride, and simplicity were hers to the latest hour.” A remarkably fresh and engaging account of Britain’s long-reigning monarch, Queen Victoria, who ascended to the throne at 18, in 1837, and died in 1901. Lytton Strachey captures her essential spirit in concise and elegant prose, with an eye and an ear keenly attuned to human nature, and its foibles. The portraits he draws of Victoria’s husband, Albert, her family members, and the procession of Prime Ministers, beginning with her beloved Lord M, are vivid and trenchant. Written only 20 years after her death, this biography exemplifies the emergence of modern thought from the Victorian Era.
Public Domain (P)2020 Madison Productions, with Spoken Realms, all rights reserved
Eminent Victorians
Summary
Eminent Victorians, Lytton Strachey's wonderfully witty and Wildean quartet of biographies, stands out as one of the most radical and groundbreaking works of its genre. With relentless precision, Strachey explores the lives of four exemplars of the Victorian age: Cardinal Manning, Florence Nightingale, Thomas Arnold and General Gordon, irreverently bringing to light the flaws, strengths, ambitions and hypocrisies of these treasured legends. The combination of thrilling and imaginative narratives with Strachey's ironic reckoning shocked many contemporary readers of the time, and even altered the course of biography, making a powerful case for its elevation to high art. PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.
Public Domain (P)2020 Naxos Audiobooks
Eminent Victorians
Summary
Lytton Strachey (1880-1932), a founder of the Bloomsbury Group, an influential group of intellectuals in England, was an essayist, drama critic, and author. Eminent Victorians (1918) undermined the old myths of high Victorianism and ushered in a new irreverent tone in which chauvinism, hypocrisy, and the English stiff upper lip were debunked. The book consists of biographies of four leading figures of the Victorian era: The Catholic leader Cardinal Manning, the nurse Florence Nightingale, the Catholic reformer Thomas Arnold, and General Charles George Gordon. Strachey’s form of biography combines psychological insight and sympathy with irreverence and wit.
Public Domain (P)2019 Museum Audiobooks