Lytton Strachey's acclaimed portrayal of Queen Victoria revolutionized the art of biography by using elements of romantic fiction and melodrama to create a warm, humorous, and very human portrait of this iconic figure. We see Victoria as a strong-willed child with a famous temper, as the 18-year-old girl queen, as a monarch, wife, mother, and widow. Equally fascinating are the depictions of her relationships: with her governess precious Lehzen, with Peel, Gladstone, and Disraeli, with her beloved Albert, and, in later life, her legendary devotion to her Highland servant John Brown, all of which show a different side of the staid, pious image that is so often attached to her.

One of the most famous and tortured romances in history — between Elizabeth I, Queen of England, and Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex — began in 1587, when she was 53 and he was 19. Their passionate affair continued for five years, until Essex was beheaded for treason in 1601. In a fast-paced succession of brilliantly-rendered scenes, Lytton Strachey portrays Elizabeth and Essex's compelling attraction for each other, their impassioned disagreements, and their mutual struggle for power, which culminated so tragically — for both of them. Alongside the doomed love affair, Strachey pins colorful portraits of the leading characters and influential figures of the time: Francis Bacon, Walter Raleigh, Robert Cecil, and other members of her glittering court who fought to assert themselves in a kingdom and a country defined by Elizabeth's incomparable reign. Strachey here illuminates, in spellbinding prose, one of the most poignant affairs in history alongside the glamor and intrigue of the Elizabethan era.

Eminent Victorians is a groundbreaking work of biography that raised the genre to the level of high art. It replaced reverence with scepticism and Strachey`s wit, iconoclasm, and narrative skill liberated the biographical enterprise. His portraits of Cardinal Manning, Florence Nightingale, Thomas Arnold, and General Gordon changed perceptions of the Victorians for a generation.