But they also foisted upon an apparently willing world a literary genre probably unmatched for tedium and inaccurate portrayal: the multivolumed “life and letters” of eminent men. These extended encomiums, usually written by grieving widows or dutiful sons and daughters, masqueraded as humbly objective accounts, simple documentation of words and activities. If we accepted these works at face value, we would have to believe that eminent Victorians actually lived by the ethical values they espoused—a fanciful proposition that Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians put to rest more than fifty years ago. Elizabeth Cary Agassiz—eminent Bostonian, founder and first president of Radcliffe College, and devoted wife of America’s premier naturalist—had all the right credentials for authorship (including a departed and lamented husband). Her Life and Correspondence of Louis Agassiz turned a fascinating, cantankerous, and not overly faithful man into a paragon of restraint, statesmanship, wisdom, and rectitude.
