Strachey's Queen Victoria (1921) is not as satirical as Eminent Victorians, although there is much humor and comedy in the story of an ordinary woman called to great responsibilities.

Anthony Nutting's biography, Gordon of Khartoum, Martyr and Misfit (1966), sees Gordon as motivated by a death-wish arising from his knowledge of his own homosexuality.

In Florence Nightingale: Avenging Angel (1999), Hugh Small draws on new material and argues that Nightingale's invalidism after the Crimean War was due to guilt—she realized that thousands of British soldiers died because medical staff failed to practice sanitary procedures that she should have enforced. In contrast to other biographers (including Strachey), Small argues for Nightingale's belief in the germ theory of infection.

Like its famous predecessor, A. N. Wilson's Eminent Victorians (1990), reexamines the lives of six representative Victorian figures, including two (Gladstone and Newman) who appear...