Michael Holroyd

When Michael Holroyd's life of Strachey appeared in 1967, it changed the course of modern biography, setting a new standard for the recounting of literary lives and launching the enduring Bloomsbury revival. In the 1960s, however, many of Strachey's friends and lovers were still alive; much could not be said, and access to letters and resources was restricted. Since then, almost all his circle has died, and homosexuality in England has been decriminalized. In telling Strachey's life anew, Holroyd has drawn on a wealth of previously unavailable material, bring fresh candor and accuracy to his account of Strachey's friendships with E. M. Forster, Virginia and Leonard Woolf, Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell, Ralph and Frances Patridge, and his companion Dora Carrington, among others. In many of Bloomsbury's three-cornered relationships, Holroyd could lay claim to only two sides of the triangle. Now he has all three with which to recount the story of this extraordinary man and his complex world. At the center of the drama is the long-lasting relationship between Strachey and Carrington and their "Triangular Trinity of Happiness" with Ralph Partridge. In equally elegant and humorous prose, Holroyd shows the parts that many men and women played in this comedy of manners as it developed into a tragedy.

The New Biography

Lytton Strachey

An epic yet intimate portrait of two theatrical dynasties, which takes us from the Victorian stage to the modern age. Ellen Terry was a natural actress who filled the theatre with a magical radiance. The Times called her the “uncrowned queen of England,” but behind her public success lay a darker story. The child bride of G.F. Watts, she eloped with a friend of Oscar Wilde’s at the age of twenty-one and gave birth to two illegitimate children. But her greatest partnership was on stage with Henry Irving. At the Lyceum Theatre in London, the two of them created a grand Cathedral of the Arts. Their intimately involved lives exceeded in plot the Shakespearean dramas they performed on stage — and indeed were curiously affected by them. They also influenced the life and work of their remarkable children, Ellen’s children in particular. Edy Craig founded a feminist theatre group, The Pioneer Players. Her brother, Edward Gordon Craig, the revolutionary stage designer who collaborated with Stanislavski is revealed by this book to be the forgotten man of modernism. He had thirteen children by eight women. He is, perhaps, the most extraordinary man Michael Holroyd has ever written about.

The Dramatic Lives of Ellen Terry, Henry Irving and Their Remarkable Families

A Strange Eventful History

Playwright, wit, socialist, polemicist, vegetarian and charmer, Bernard Shaw was a controversial literary figure, the scourge of Victorian values and middle-class pretensions. This is Michael Holroyd's essential biography of George Bernard Shaw. With its pace and verve, its comedy, drama and politics, it portrays a provocative and paradoxical figure sympathetically and movingly.

Bernard Shaw

Playwright, wit, socialist, polemicist and irresistible charmer, he was the most controversial literary figure of his age and the scourge of all that was most oppressive in late-Victorian England.

Bernard Shaw: 1950-1991, the last laugh

To his own generation Bernard Shaw's greatest creation seemed to be himself. Playwright, wit, socialist, polemicist and irresistible charmer, he was the most controversial literary figure of his age and the scourge of all that was most oppressive in late-Victorian England. In his writing and public speeches, he embodied the unfamiliar virtues of reason, sense and unanswerable good humor. And yet, as the opening volume of this masterly four-volume biography makes clear, Shaw's invention of this monumental figure was a paradoxical method of concealment and his way of coming to terms with a world that had abandoned him in childhood. - Jacket flap.

"To his own generation Bernard Shaw's greatest creation seemed to be himself". This section of Holroyd's presentation of Shaw's life takes the reader from Shaw's birth in 1856 up to his marriage in 1898. Without romanticising or condemning his subject, Holroyd summons up a vivid picture of the social and sexual wars and triumphs which so influenced Shaw's life and work.

In a single-volume format, Michael Holroyd's masterpiece of a biography offers new verve and pace; Shaw's world is more dramatically revealed as Holroyd counterpoints the private and public Shaw with inimitable insight and scholarship.

The One-volume Definitive Edition

Michael Holroyd's magnificent biography of Bernard Shaw is now available in a lively and accessible one-volume abridgment by the author. Covering almost a century, from 1856 to 1950, Holroyd magically captures the essence of Shaw's genius in a tragicomedy that is constantly absorbing, surprising, funny, and moving.

This work is the third of three volumes on the life of Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950), covering the last half of the 19th century. It opens with the United Kingdom's General Election campaign of 1918, and gradually reveals Shaw as conjuror, fabulist and seer. Here is Shaw in old age, a mysterious comic, but above all one of the greatest men of letters of this century.

Bernard Shaw: 1918-1950, the lure of fantasy

The lure of fantasy

Bernard Shaw: 1818-1950 The Lure of Fantasy

PLEASE NOTE: THIS EBOOK DOES NOT CONTAIN PHOTOS INCLUDED IN THE PRINT EDITION. Deemed "a prodigy among biographers" by The New York Times Book Review, Michael Holroyd transformed biography into an art. Now he turns his keen observation, humane insight, and epic scope on an ensemble cast, a remarkable dynasty that presided over the golden age of theater. Ellen Terry was an ethereal beauty, the child bride of a Pre-Raphaelite painter who made her the face of the age. George Bernard Shaw was so besotted by her gifts that he could not bear to meet her, lest the spell she cast from the stage be broken. Henry Irving was an ambitious, harsh-voiced merchant's clerk, but once he painted his face and spoke the lines of Shakespeare, his stammer fell away to reveal a magnetic presence. He would become one of the greatest actor-managers in the history of the theater. Together, Terry and Irving created a powerhouse of the arts in London's Lyceum Theatre, with Bram Stoker—who would go on to write Dracula—as manager. Celebrities whose scandalous private lives commanded global attention, they took America by stormin wildly popular national tours. Their all-consuming professional lives left little room for their brilliant but troubled children. Henry's boys followed their father into the theater but could not escape the shadow of his fame. Ellen's feminist daughter, Edy, founded an avant-garde theater and a largely lesbian community at her mother's country home. But it was Edy's son, the revolutionary theatrical designer Edward Gordon Craig, who possessed the most remarkable gifts and the most perplexing inability to realize them. A now forgotten modernist visionary, he collaborated with the Russian director Stanislavski on a production of Hamlet that forever changed the way theater was staged. Maddeningly self-absorbed, he inherited his mother's potent charm and fathered thirteen children by eight women, including a daughter with the dancer Isadora Duncan. An epic story spanning a century of cultural change, A Strange Eventful History finds space for the intimate moments of daily existence as well as the bewitching fantasies played out by its subjects. Bursting with charismatic life, it is an incisive portrait of two families who defied the strictures of their time. It will be swiftly recognized as a classic. Please note: This ebook edition does not contain photos and illustrations that appeared in the print edition.

The Dramatic Lives of Ellen Terry, Henry Irving, and Their Remarkable Families

The noted biographer examines his own origins with a chronicle of his family, using his parents' accounts of their early lives as a starting point and elaborating with the results of his own explorations into the past.

Basil Street Blues

Lytton Strachey : a critical biography

A Critical Biography

When Michael Holroyd's life of Strachey first appeared in 1967, it was hailed as a landmark in contemporary biography. Drawing now on new material, published and unpublished, Holroyd has completely revised and rewritten his masterwork to tell the full story of this complex man and his world as it could not be told while many of Strachey's friends and lovers were still alive. And at the heart of the story is the poignant liasion between Strachey and the painter Dora Carrington. A panorama of the social, literary, political and sexual life of a generation, LYTTON STRACHEY reverberates in the mind like a great novel.

Michael Holroyd

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