Herbert Pollitt born 23 August 1871 (d. 1942)Collector and connoisseur Herbert Pollitt, known as Jerome Pollitt, was an amateur female impersonator of late 19th-century England, who performed under the stage name Diane de Rougy, in tribute to the actress Liane de Pougy. He was a close friend of the British illustrator and writer Aubrey Beardsley - who created this ex-libris (book plate) for his friend.
He is known to have had an affair with the young Aleister Crowley - Crowley was 23 and in his final year at Cambridge. Pollitt was ten years his senior. Later he immortalised Pollitt in The Scented Garden of Abdullah the Satirist - a collection of poems which are a blend of Persian mysticism and the glorification of homosexual love, written in the style of ghazals by an imaginary seventeenth-century poet. They are supposedly translated into English by an Anglo-Indian, Major Lutiy, helped by an anonymous 'editor', and are then discussed by an equally fictitious clergyman. The collection, however, is typically Crowley-esque: both spoof and serious.