History Free Indirect: Reading Creative Techniques in Lytton Strachey's Queen Victoria.

Situating itself in line with Max Saunders' thesis in Self Impression (2010), this paper is a literary-critical reconnaissance of the creative techniques Lytton Strachey employs in Queen Victoria (1921). My essay attempts to elicit the ways in which Strachey executes his modernist argument, intended to debunk Victorian perspectives, via a canny mix of traditional and modernist techniques of narration, usually associated with fiction. Showing how – in the way of an impressionist historian – he both inhabits the frame of his narrative as well as directs its very framing, I discuss his use of free indirect style and cognate methods of characterisation. I also discuss his novelistic 'rhythm', as he negotiates between personal and particular histories and wider more universal history; his psychological and psychoanalytic resources for biographical insight; and formal features of his narrative that make use of choric and stage-like structuring, as well as meta-historical tropes of fate and destiny. Literary critical methods deployed by Strachey, precociously, in the arsenal of his method, at a time before such literary critical methods had been overtly established are also discussed in brief as signifying features of his innovation. This paper hopes to offer a concrete interpretation of Strachey's well-known candidacy as the father, or one of them, of the 'new biography'. Being a concrete analysis of only one of Strachey's works, less examined than others, the paper claims only to put traditional notions of the new biography and of modernism under the lens of this one particular but signal work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]