Novelistic traits in non-fiction: Lytton Strachey's Eminent Victorians

The book Eminent Victorians as a whole and its chapter Florence Nightingale, by Lytton Strachey, a famous writer, literary critic, biographer, are under analysis from the point of view of the novelty of the book’s form and content. The research stress is done at the peculiarities of Strachey’s approaches to the genre of biography as the ones which correspond with the famous modernist group’s ‘Bloomsbury’ views on new art, free of old-fashioned norms, traditions and modes, the art which fully respond to modern life. It is demonstrated how much innovative is Strachey when construing the very subject of biographical narrative - a historical figure; it is shown the artistic ways of Strachey’s use of profound psychological analysis which makes a biography closer to a novel, and irony and satire which contradict idealization of the time and personality.