Critical Reception
Bertrand Russell wrote from Brixton Prison to Gladys Rinder on 21 May 1918.
It is brilliant, delicious, exquisitely civilized. I enjoyed as much as any the Gordon, which alone was quite new to me. I often laughed out loud in my cell while I was reading the book. The warder came to my cell to remind me that prison was a place of punishment.
The American critic Edmund Wilson wrote in the New Republic of 21 September, 1932, not long after Strachey's death "Lytton Strachey's chief mission, of course, was to take down once and for all the pretensions of the Victorian age to moral superiority... neither the Americans nor the English have ever, since Eminent Victorians appeared, been able to feel quite the same about the legends that had dominated their pasts. Something had been punctured for good."
Read more about this topic: Eminent Victorians
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