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Virginia Woolf wrote a fascinating essay "The Art of Biography" which is included in the book The Death of the Moth and Other Essays. She asks "Could not biography produce something of the intensity of poetry, something of the excitement of drama, and yet keep also the peculiar virtue that belongs to fact — its suggestive reality, its own proper creativeness?" She uses Strachey and his various biographies to illustrate her points. Biography as a literary form and as an interest to the reading public did not come of age until the nineteenth century. Strachey was born at the right moment in time when biographers gained freedoms to expose a complete, truthful portrait. Before biographies were more hagiographic in spirit and did not expose flaws or weaknesses. Biographers have the limitation, however, that their subjects are bound by facts that can be authenticated. Woolf says "But these facts are not like the facts of science — once they are discovered, always the same. They are subject to changes of opinion; opinions change as the times change." The biographer has the challenge to create unity from the diversity of facts and opinions about his subject. And, much was known about Queen Victoria from her own prolific writings and those of her contemporaries to authenticate Strachey's writing. Less information was available in the second half of her life during her self-imposed exile in widowhood (Strachey referred to it as a "veil" upon this time period). Hence, Strachey takes a quicker summary approach to this period in his book.
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