"At the Bottom": Lytton Strachey and the Sodomitical Archive

Lytton Strachey's private correspondence turns continually to tropes of rediscovery and exhumation. Having made serious effort to arrange and preserve his letters for posterity, Strachey desperately hoped that they would one day be read by future generations. At the heart of this desire was the specter of his self-identified, but during his lifetime publicly undisclosed, homosexuality. As he negotiated the privacy of queer life in the early twentieth century, Strachey fantasized about a world "a hundred years hence" when his letters could finally be made public. The practice of letter writing worked for him as a way to insert himself into that imagined future, sustaining the illusion of a queer touch across time.