Seven Wives and Seven Prisons

Giles Lytton Strachey was an English writer and critic. A founding member of the Bloomsbury Group and author of Eminent Victorians he established a new form of biography in which psychological insight and sympathy are combined with irreverence and wit. His biography Queen Victoria (1921) was awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. Strachey's theory of biography was now fully developed and mature. He was greatly influenced by Dostoyevsky whose novels he had been reading and reviewing as they appeared in Constance Garnett's translations. The influence of Freud was important on Strachey's later works most notably on Elizabeth and Essex but not at this earlier stage.