BOOKS

Strachey's Virgin Queen

Michael Holroyd

Lytton Strachey began his 'tussle with the Virgin Queen' on 17 December 1925, completing the first two pages of Elizabeth and Essex that day. None of his biographies was to give him so much trouble. Partly this was a matter of stamina: he was by then in his 45th year and becoming more quickly prone to exhaustion. But there were other reasons: the story intertwined in a complicated way with his own love-life and involved the spending of much emotional energy; also he was attempting in this book an experiment that was to test new techniques in biography.

In a letter to his sister Dorothy Bussy, Strachey had complained of having led 'a dog's life, between Queen Elizabeth's love affairs and my own'. It was Maynard Keynes who first detected the interaction between Strachey's life and that of his subjects. 'You seem, on the whole, to imagine yourself as Elizabeth', Keynes suggested, `but I see from the pictures that it is Essex whom you have got up as yourself. But I expect you have managed to get the best of both worlds.'

Shortly before beginning Elizabeth and Essex, Strachey had met and fallen in love with a good-looking young man `with a melting smile and dark grey eyes' called Roger Senhouse. He seems to have sensed a parallel between his feelings for this young man and those of Elizabeth for the Earl of Essex. But, since he tended to fall in love with the kind of person he would have liked to be (blue-eyed rowing blues, muscular mountaineers, young Old Etonians), so, at one remove, Essex became a romanticised version of himself. It was this mingling of his own emotional life with that of his characters that gives a feeling of intimacy to a world that was otherwise remote.

Strachey dedicated Elizabeth and Essex to his younger brother and his sister-in-law, James and Alix Strachey, who. were then pupils of Sigmund Freud and became his authorised translators into English. The chief psychological influence on Eminent Victorians had been Dostoevsky. Lytton did not read German and, until the 1920s (James Strachey's translation of Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego appeared in 1922) Freud's writings had been available in English only in indifferent versions. By 1926 Lytton had picked up a good deal of Freud from discussions with James and Alix, and come to accept the general premise that unconscious processes, among them infant sexuality and the adult operation of the sex instinct, permeate human thought and action. He avoided technical terms, but used Freudian principles as a method by which to suggest that the 'tragic history' (his subtitle to the book) of Queen Elizabeth and the Earl of Essex was inevitable. In particular, he implemented Freud's theories concerning fatherdaughter relationships to account for the probable underlying attitude of Elizabeth to Essex's execution.

How valid are such interpretations? Certainly they make for unorthodox history, and particularly at that time. But after reading the book towards the end of 1928, Freud wrote to Strachey: You are aware of what other historians so easily overlook — that it is impossible to understand the past with certainty, because we cannot divine men's motives and the essence of their minds and so cannot interpret their actions . . . with regard to the people of past times we are in the same position as with dreams to which we have been given no associations — and only a layman could expect us to interpret such dreams as those. As a historian, then, you show that you are steeped in the spirit of psychoanalysis. And, with reservations such as these, you have approached one of the most remarkable figures in your country's history, you have known how to track back her character to the impressions of her childhood, you have touched upon her most hidden motives with equal boldness and discretion, and it is very possible that you have succeeded in making a correct reconstruction of what actually occurred.

Queen Victoria and Elizabeth and Essex are love stories. Strachey's description of Victoria's strong sexuality and his suggestion that Albert may have been homosexual, were almost tastefully accomplished. But when he moves from the Mother Empress to the Virgin Queen, his tone becomes far more erotic. Probing the secret of Elizabeth's virginity, he writes:

Though, at the centre of her being, desire had turned to repulsion, it had not vanished altogether; on the contrary, the compensating forces of nature had redoubled its vigour elsewhere. Though the precious citadel itself was never to be violated, there were surrounding territories, there were outworks and bastions over which exciting battles might be fought, and which even, at moments, be allowed to fall into the bold hands of an assailant.

To emphasize the way in which the psychological disturbance of Elizabeth's childhood had made sexual intercourse impossible for her, Strachey invented on the queen's behalf an early traumatic experience. 'Manhood — the fascinating, detestable entity which had first come upon her concealed in yellow magnificence in her father's lap — manhood was overthrown at last, and in the person of that traitor it should be rooted out. Literally, perhaps . . . she knew well enough the punishment for high treason.'

The punishment for treason included castration to which, throughout the book, there are numerous allusions. `We are aware', wrote Edmund Wilson, 'for the first time disagreeably of the high-voiced old Bloomsbury gossip gloating over the scandals of the past as he ferreted them out in his library.'

A preoccupation with sexual themes and deviations, even when given the imprimatur of Freud, is irregular among historians, and the book has ttnded to be under-valued in comparison with its predecessors. It is true that Elizabeth and Essex has less wit and fire than Eminent Victorians, and that Strachey's research among published works (unlike that for Queen Victoria) was in complete. He manipulated historical data by dovetailing fragments of letters and conversations and by editing speeches without ellipsis. Essex, too, is a character of little historical significance (he finds no place for example in G. M. Trevelyan's History of England). In a sense the book is not history at all but, as G. B. Harrison described it, 'a fine scenario'. Even so, some historians have found it useful, Conyers Read seeing here 'some brilliant glimpses of her (Elizabeth) and her court'; J. B. Black describing it as a 'penetrating and suggestive study'; and A. L. Rowse judging it to be a 'brilliant and insufficiently appreciated book'.

As a contribution to the art of biography, though praised by E. M. Forster as being in some ways Strachey's 'greatest work', this book has never been wholly accepted. It occupies among Strachey's non-fiction a place similar to that of Orlando among the fiction of Virginia Woolf, who believed that Elizabeth and Essex represented a misuse of Strachey's imagination: 'he becomes all purple and gold, like the cheaper effects at the Pantomime'. In her essay 'The Art of Biography', she called it 'a daring experiment, carried out with magnificent skill', which, though it failed through flouting the natural limitations of biography, might lead 'the way to further discoveries'.

So far there has been no Columbus among biographers to make these discoveries. Ironically, modern biography has rejected the model of the biographer who revitalised this literary art for the 20th century. Yet among the reading public it was immediately more popular than Strachey's other works, became widely translated, and made publishing history in the United States.

'It's being very successful', Strachey admitted. 'However a good many copies will have to be sold to keep pace with my growing extravagance. Aubusson carpets for instance — I am plunging wildly in that direction — egged on, of course, by Carrington.' Carrington reported him as being 'very set up by the success of Queen Elizabeth'. Yet Strachey continued to question the kind of success he had achieved. When Vanessa Bell asked him whether he liked being so enormously celebrated, the best truthful answer he could manage was: 'It's vaguely agreeable.'

Extracted from the introduction to Elizabeth and Essex, published today by Oxford Paperbacks at £2.95.