I was stretching my weary shoulders this summer, between rehearsals at a chamber music workshop, when I spotted Queen Victoria reposing regally on a shelf in a rec room at Scripps College.

I love finding books that way. They fall unexpectedly into your hands and the cosmos whispers "read it, read it." And you do. And you enjoy another book you'd never in a lifetime read on purpose.

Not that Lytton Strachey's biography of Queen Victoria is difficult to read; it is not; nor is it abstruse, boring, scholarly, off-putting, badly written or free of humor; it is none of those things. It's just forgotten, obscure, out of print, and otherwise unlikely to be picked up by modern readers.

Opening this ex-library, water-stained, underlined, somewhat beaten up hard back I knew little about the author and nothing about his book. I could not figure out what to make of it.

Is it a book of praise for the great 19th century Victoria Regina, Queen of Great Britain and Empress of India? Is it a gossipy tell-all of palace intrigue and strange personal moments?

It turned out to be both, and more. I spent hours happily entertained by a rather old-fashioned biography of the quintessential old-fashioned woman.

After I finished Strachey's Queen Victoria I found time to look up his story and the book's history. One scholar said this book "significantly shaped public and scholarly perception of (Victoria's) life and reign... Unlike his more biting Eminent Victorians the anecdotal style and clear affection for the subject make this work a landmark biography."

Clear affection was exactly the element that surprised me. I had expected a more cynical work from a leading member of the London literary lights who called themselves the Bloomsbury Group. Certainly Strachey points out Victoria's intellectual shortcomings, her cranky disputes with the government, her rigid manners and frumpy appearance. But he likes and admires her, too.

Lytton Strachey lived from 1880 to 1932. He came from a distinguished English family known for eccentricity "to the point of dottiness" and strong political opinions. Strachey himself was ambivalent about Victoria and the Victorian age.

In a letter to Virginia Woolf he asked, "Is it prejudice, do you think, that makes us hate the Victorians, or is it the truth of the case? They seem to me to be a set of mouthing bungling hypocrites; but perhaps really there is a baroque charm about them which will be discovered by our great-great-grandchildren..."

Queen Victoria came out in 1921, dedicated to Virginia Woolf. It was a smash hit and sold out the initial print run of 5,000 copies within 24 hours.

Victoria's life can be divided neatly in two: The early years of her reign with Prince Albert, with whom she was deeply in love, and the many sad years following his early death. Victoria mourned, it seemed, endlessly. She had all sizes of Albert monuments built. She ordered his room be left undisturbed forever. Each morning while Victoria lived Albert's wardrobe was freshened and a new suit of clothes laid out on his bed.

"As the years passed, and the royal mourning remained as unrelieved as ever," Strachey writes, "...It was observed that the Queen's protracted privacy not only cast a gloom over high society, not only deprived the populace of its pageantry, but also exercised a highly deleterious effect upon the dressmaking, millinary, and hosiery trades."

Strachey laid out his idea of the art of biography in the preface to Eminent Victorians:

"To preserve, for instance, a becoming brevity -- a brevity which excludes everything that is redundant and nothing that is significant -- that, surely, is the first duty of the biographer. The second, no less surely, is to maintain his own freedom of spirit. It is not his business to be complimentary; it is his business to lay bare the facts of the case, as he understands them."

It was the chatty style that threw me off at first. And for that entertaining style alone I would happily recommend this book to readers of biography and history.

Aired Sunday August 20, 2006 at 10:55 am and Wednesday August 23, 2006 at 1:00 pm

Orders/Information:

Some brief notes on Strachey by Jone Johnson Lewis: http://womenshistory.about.com/library/etext/ls/bl_lsqv_00.htm

From a bookseller's catalog description (Cambridge Book & Print Gallery): "The work... was an immediate success with the first 5,000 copies selling out within twenty four hours. Despite its popularity, Strachey felt its popularity was a mixed blessing, confessing to his brother James, "at any rate, I feel that I ought to do something particularly outrageous for my next book, in order to retrieve my reputation."

Queen Victoria is not technically out of print, but there are no reasonably priced editions. As a new book, it currently is available in a $37.95 paperback or a $17.99 hardcover:

Paperback: Queen Victoria by Lytton Strachey. Kessinger Publishing. $37.95, ISBN 9780766199705
Hard cover: Queen Victoria by Lytton Strachey. IndyPublish.com. $17.99, ISBN 9781404326828

If you own an MS Smartphone, a Windows computer, a Palm or Pocket PC or similar devices, you can download the entire text of the book for $6.95 from EbookMall: http://www.ebookmall.com/ebook/93719-ebook.htm and read it on your electronic device. You will be restricted to "no printing, no copy and paste." You also will be required to download a free software program to enable you to read the proprietary formatted text.

Queen Victoria can be found on the out of print book market for prices ranging from one dollar to as much as $485 for a leather-bound first edition in "very good" condition (try www.abebooks.com or www.addall.com if you'd like to search for a used or collectible copy).

This would be an excellent time for Penguin Classics or Oxford University Press to come out with an inexpensive paperback edition of Queen Victoria with a scholarly introduction. I wonder how they make the decision which classics to reprint?

Eminent Victorians by Lytton Strachey. Dover Value Editions paperback $8.95. ISBN: 0486451364 EAN: 9780486451367.

Eminent Victorians by Lytton Strachey. Dover Value Editions paperback $8.95. ISBN: 0486451364 EAN: 9780486451367.

By the way, I'm mailing back my "stolen" or "borrowed" copy of Queen Victoria to Scripps. Can't bear to leave that karma hanging out there.