Lytton Strachey, "Queen Victoria" (Chatto & Windus, 1921, and constantly reprinted as a Penguin Modern Classic and in other editions).

Queen Victoria died 100 years ago this year. That centenary has prompted the excellent recent PBS series on her life and other commemorative events throughout the world. There is hardly a village in England to this day without its monument to her or to her Prince Consort, Albert. Her solid portrait is still the logo of Bombay Sapphire Gin. Albert's likeness on red tins sold huge amounts of pipe tobacco. Although they were born in the same year (1819), Albert died of typhoid fever forty years before the Queen (in 1861).

His death was a transforming event in her life and in her reign. Whereas Albert had often been an influence for enlightened, humane reform, Victoria's most favored prime minister, Disraeli, led her straight into the late Romantic misadventures of empire, a subject that Strachey does not touch, not once mentioning Cecil Rhodes or English atrocities in South Africa. (What Strachey might have done with that then impossible story is suggested by his brilliant chapter on General Gordon in his earlier book, "Eminent Victorians" [1918].)

Strachey, nevertheless, describes Albert's death (rightly) as a tragedy, both for Victoria and for Europe: "The sudden removal of the Prince was not merely a matter of overwhelming personal concern to Victoria; it was an event of national, of European importance. He was only forty-two, and in the ordinary course of nature he might have been expected to live at least thirty years longer. Had he done so...as time went on, the Prince's influence must have enormously increased. For, in addition to his intellectual and moral qualities, he enjoyed, by virtue of his position, one supreme advantage which every other holder of high office in the country was without: he was permanent."

Even though these sentences are about Albert rather than Victoria, they capture well the genius of Strachey's biography. This is a book that transformed the writing of biography in that it is not in any sense a saint's life. Her energetic youth, her passions, her grief, and her rediscovery of vitality in old age are all here.

So, also, is John Brown, her husband's gillie, whom Strachey believed saved her from a debilitating widowhood: "She liked his strength, his solidity, the sense he gave her of physical security; she even liked his rugged manners and his rough unaccommodating speech. She allowed him to take liberties with her which would have been unthinkable from anybody else."

But the thing that is most remarkable about Strachey's Victoria is that she is not a creature of men, however strong her passions for them were. Even as a young queen, she firmly kept her royal power to herself. Politically, Albert at first was little more than "a cipher."

This is not, however, a warts and all biography, however much the intimacy of its details were fascinatingly shocking to the book's first readers. Instead, Strachey finds a way to be critically affirmative. He extols the icon of the Victorian age even as he rejects the way Victorians had once preferred, with self-congratulation, to write about themselves. What he shows is that even the Queen was not as boringly proper as she worked so hard to suggest.

The years after Albert's death certainly took their toll on her, especially with the deaths of children and friends: Princess Alice in 1878, the Prince Imperial in 1879 (killed in the Zulu War), Disraeli in 1881, John Brown in 1883, and Prince Leopold in 1884. Furthermore, in 1882, for the seventh time, she was the object of a failed assassination attempt.

About those attempts on her life, Strachey writes, "All, with a single exception, were perpetrated by adolescents, whose motives were apparently not murderous, since, save in the case of Maclean [the last], none of their pistols was loaded. These unhappy youths, who, after buying their cheap weapons, stuffed them with gunpowder and paper, and then went off, with the certainty of immediate detection, to click them in the face of royalty...." Strachey devotes the longest paragraph in his book (four pages) to a preliminary psychological analysis of these attacks. Maclean was found not guilty by reason of insanity, a verdict that the Queen claimed not to understand.

What is most interesting here in Strachey's narrative is that he is overtly declaring himself an advocate of psychological explanation, which has been the method of his book all along. His brother James Strachey was, of course, the eventual great translator of the complete works of Freud. But Lytton Strachey dedicates his biography of the Queen to Virginia Woolf, an honor it took her a while to acknowledge because she was deeply envious of her friend's achievement.

Once she swallowed her pride, Woolf wrote, "In time to come Lytton Strachey's Queen Victoria will be Queen Victoria, just as Boswell's Johnson is now Dr. Johnson. The other versions will fade and disappear." And so it has been. Strachey's "Queen Victoria" offers still the basic narrative, however much later biographers have added or corrected.