Date of Award
Spring 5-8-2017
Document Type
Honors Project
Degree Name
Bachelor of Arts
Department
English, Linguistics, and Communication
First Advisor
Haffey, Kate
Major or Concentration
English
Abstract
Lytton Strachey, one of the most prominent members of the Bloomsbury Group, has long been regarded as creating "the new biography" with his book, Eminent Victorians. One of the more innovative techniques used in his biography was using active voice through his narrator, an element influenced by the narrative structure of Henry Fielding. Not only did Strachey change the field of historical biography with his active narrator and critiques on the discipline of biography itself, but he also influenced another huge presence in the Bloomsbury Group, Virginia Woolf. Years after Eminent Victorians, Woolf took Strachey's narrator and applied it two-fold to her biographical work, Orlando. The book takes the construction of "the new biography" and pushes it even further by adding a parodic tone. Both Strachey and Woolf revolutionized the field of biography by renouncing the unbiased, objective angle that most historians and biographers had used previously.
Recommended Citation
Beyer, Natalie I., "The Active Narrator: Fieldian Narration in Strachey and Woolf" (2017). Student Research Submissions. 166.
https://scholar.umw.edu/student_research/166