Lytton Strachey is best remembered as a biographer from his famous Eminent Victorians to his lives of Victoria and Elizabeth I. His letters, however, depict better the breadth of the man's life whether it be philosophical interchanges with G. E. Moore and Bertrand Russell, friendly confidences shared with fellow members of the Bloomsbury set, or love letters launched to various partners including Carrington and Duncan Grant. The book is a delight to open at random and read mementos from his life at most any point because he was always corresponding with such thoughtful and interesting people. The editor, Paul Levy, includes helpful notations about the details of events when necessary for context making the collection even more enjoyable. It is his passion for literature and life that impresses me the most as when he wrote to G. E. Moore in October, 1903 upon reading Principia Ethica, which had been published the previous week, saying: "Your grand conclusion made me gasp -- it was so violently definite."(p 17) For those readers interested in literary activity in England and the Bloomsbury circle this is a useful volume. ( )

I found this an extremely enjoyable book, and regretted it could only be a small selection of Lytton Strachey's letters - even though there were nearly 660 pages of them. The incidental information about the many other literary and political figures of the early twentieth century whose lives interacted with Stratchey's is fascinating too.

The editor prefixes most letters with notes about the people and events mentioned in them, but I nevertheless often found myself becoming confused by all the different characters. The index, though thorough, has a major drawback in that, while many people are referred to in both the letters and the notes by their first names, they are only indexed by their surnames. The bibliography is very sparse; and frequent references to gaps in "Leonard and James's edition" left me searching elsewhere to deduce that it was L. Woolf and J. Strachey's 1956 edition of "Virginia Woolf and Lytton Strachey: letters". I was less successful in determining just what Strachey meant in half a dozen references to one of his lover's 'lolls'. ( )