After studying at Cambridge (1899–1903), Strachey lived in London, where he became a leader in the artistic, intellectual, and literary Bloomsbury group (q.v.). He published critical writings, especially on French literature, but his greatest achievement was in biography. After Eminent Victorians (1918) and Queen Victoria (1921), he wrote Elizabeth and Essex (1928) and Portraits in Miniature (1931). Treating his subjects from a highly idiosyncratic point of view, he was fascinated by personality and motive and delighted in pricking the pretensions of the great and reducing them to somewhat less than life-size. His aim was to paint a portrait; and though this led to caricature and sometimes, through tendentious selection of material, to inaccuracy, he taught biographers a sense of form and of background, and he sharpened their critical acumen.

His defects as a biographer arose mainly from his limited vision of life. He saw politics largely as intrigue, religion as a ludicrous anachronism, and personal relations as life's supremely important facet. Though bitterly attacked during his lifetime and after, Strachey remains a phenomenon in English letters and a preeminent humorist and wit.