Psychoanalysis, Sexuality, and Lytton Strachey's Theory of Biography

Almost all the critics who have written about Lytton Strachey are agreed on the fact that he valued and himself possessed “psychological insight,” whether or not they approved its applications and accepted its findings.1 For example, in the most thorough and scholarly work done to date on Strachey's contributions to the art of biography, Charles R. Sanders has written that Strachey's study of the French dramatist Racine was of great value in preparing him to achieve excellence as a biographer: “In Racine's plays he found three of the qualities which he admired most in biography: an unfailing sense of reality, selection made in accordance with true judgment, and psychological insight of a very high order.” But Professor Sanders does not proceed to a definition of the precise quality of Strachey's insight except to quote Strachey's comment on Racine's concern with “the mystery of the mind of man”—“its twistings and vibrations.”2

In another study, more popular and less scholarly in its development of ideas, James Truslow Adams places Strachey among the psychological school of biographers as “the unquestioned leader and by far the most influential practitioner.”3 True, Professor Adams mentions Strachey in association with psychoanalysis—or what he describes as the pretentious “pseudo-scientific school of psychological biography”; but he does not primarily consider Strachey a