Lytton Strachey’s Former Home
Bloomsbury took the square house by house
Lytton Strachey’s mother took this house in 1919, and he lived here from 1921 until his death in 1932 – from 1929 in the ground-floor flat, with three of his unmarried sisters, Pippa, Marjorie and Pernel, in the rooms above. He had already published Eminent Victorians (1918), which broke with the reverent conventions of Victorian biography and made his name; he finished Queen Victoria here in 1921 and Elizabeth and Essex in 1928. As one Bloomsbury friend after another took a house nearby, he remarked to Virginia Woolf that “the whole square will become a sort of college.” The English Heritage blue plaque on the front reads simply: critic and biographer, lived here.