Lytton Strachey (1880-1932), a founder of the Bloomsbury Group, an influential group of intellectuals in England, was an essayist, drama critic, and author. Eminent Victorians (1918) undermined the old myths of high Victorianism and ushered in a new irreverent tone in which chauvinism, hypocrisy, and the English stiff upper lip were debunked. 

The book consists of biographies of four leading figures of the Victorian era: The Catholic leader Cardinal Manning, the nurse Florence Nightingale, the Catholic reformer Thomas Arnold, and General Charles George Gordon. Strachey’s form of biography combines psychological insight and sympathy with irreverence and wit.