Frederick Rolfe born 22 July 1860 (d. 1913)Frederick William Rolfe, better known as Baron Corvo, and also calling himself 'Frederick William Serafino Austin Lewis Mary Rolfe', was an English writer, novelist, artist, fantasist and eccentric.
Rolfe was born in Cheapside, London, the son of a piano manufacturer; he left school at the age of fourteen and became a teacher. He converted to Roman Catholicism in 1886. With his conversion came a strongly felt vocation to priesthood which persisted throughout his life despite being constantly frustrated and never realised. In 1887 he was sponsored to train at Oscott seminary near Birmingham and in 1889 was a student at the Scots College in Rome, but was thrown out by both due to his inability to concentrate on priestly studies. At this stage he entered the circle of the Duchess of Sforza-Cesarini, who, he claimed, adopted him as a grandson and gave him the use of the title of 'Baron Corvo'. This became his best-known pseudonym; he also used several other pseudonyms. More often he abbreviated his own name to 'Fr. Rolfe' (an ambiguous usage, suggesting he was the priest he had hoped to become).
As 'Baron Corvo' he was an occasional contributor to the Yellow Book published by John Lane; these contributions consisted of a series called Stories Toto Told Me, humorous retellings of Italian peasant legends about the saints, later collected in book form with that title and with a larger sequel, In His Own Image. These made his early reputation, such as it was, and this was enlarged by his Chronicles of the House of Borgia (1901), a serious if idiosyncratic historical study in extravangant Baroque prose. His extensive and obsessive erudition about the Renaissance period, of which the Chronicles is the most solid result, bore fruit in his two loosely-linked and intensely imagined historical novels of the Borgia period, Don Tarquinio (described by the author as 'a Kataleptic Phantasmatic Romance'), and Don Renato.
During his lifetime, Rolfe was also a noted photographer.
Rolfe spent most of the rest of his life as a freelance writer, mainly in England but eventually in Venice. He also executed a number of paintings and designs, including cover designs for some of his books, and some church paintings in Christchurch, Dorset and Holywell Chester( These paintings took the form of banners, lodged in the Catholic Church at Holywell and processed through the town on occasion. Rolfe painted the figures of the Saints and John Holden assisted with the lettering on the borders. Some 5 of Rolfe's banners remain in existence).
Throughout Rolfe's life, his argumentative nature made him many enemies and lost him numerous friends.
Many passages of his books can be read as more or less veiled descriptions of homosexuality; this is explicit in his posthumous work The Desire and Pursuit of the Whole (published 1934) in which he also took revenge on his many actual and imagined enemies. Eventually, out of money and out of luck, he died in Venice from a stroke.
Rolfe's fiction steers well clear of any 'mainstream'. His works still find interested readers today, perhaps largely on account of his prose style and the unusual personality it reveals; erudite, ornate, and somewhat pretentious, they belong on the same shelf with Symbolist prose poetry.
His most autobiographical novel is Nicholas Crabbe and his best-known by far (and least-distracting in its eccentricities) is Hadrian the Seventh (1904), a fantasy autobiography in which an obscure literary Englishman, George Arthur Rose, bearing many similarities to Rolfe (including his heavy smoking) is elected Pope and moves forward with an ambitious programme to set the world to rights. The book was very successfully adapted by Peter Luke as a stage production in London in 1968, in which the part of Hadrian/Rolfe was played by Alec McCowen. Further productions with Barry Morse played in Australia, on Broadway, and in a short USA national tour.