Ermyntrude and Esmeralda was written as an exchange of correspondence between two teenage girls who have pledged themselves to find out all they can about sex, love, and making babies. Their reported discoveries include a passionate love affair between Esmeralda's younger brother and his male tutor ("Will they have babies? If not, why not?"); Ermyntrude's affair with a handsome footman on a staircase; the attempted seduction of Ermyntrude by her governess. By using nursery terms for private parts of the anatomy (bow-wows and pussy cats will never sound the same), Strachey makes all the more ludicrous society's standard reaction of horror to sex and deviation.Wit, irony, exaggeration, melodrama, these were Lytton Strachey's methods in this recently discovered and never before published novella. It is when Strachey is not humorous that the reader should beware of taking him seriously. In Ermyntrude and Esmeralda he is extremely amusing, but he was seeking more than mere enjoyment for his readers; he was seeking sexual enlightenment and toleration in a period that was hostile to the pleasures of the flesh, or at least hypocritical about them.--From the 1969 edition.