Giles Lytton Strachey (1880-1932) was an English biographer and critic known for his satire of the Victorian Era.

Lytton Strachey was born in London on March 1, 1880. He was the eleventh of thirteen children of an upper-middle-class family. His father, Sir Richard Strachey, was a colonial Indian civil servant and civil engineer and a British army general; he was a typical Victorian explorer/scientist. Sir Richard's second wife, Lytton's mother, was the daughter of Sir J. P. Grant of Rothiemurchus and was keen on French literature; she influenced Lytton's precocious literary talent. Even though Lytton's family members on both sides were well-connected and prosperous, the large parental home in unfashionable Bayswater was "suffocating" to him. He was a spoiled child, of frail health, and always withdrawn. Even so, he had an iron will and sat in cultural judgment of the world his parents inhabited: the Victorian era.

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