Frederick Rolfe

Born in London on July 22, 1860, Frederick Rolfe became known to readers as Baron Corvo. He was a writer, artist, and photographer, and his life was as dramatic as his fiction. He longed for a Roman Catholic vocation and studied in Rome, but he was never ordained, a disappointment that shaped much of his later work.

Rolfe is most famous for Hadrian the Seventh, the 1904 novel about a rejected Englishman who unexpectedly becomes pope. The book helped secure his reputation, and it remains the work most closely linked with his name. His writing often blends sharp comedy, personal grievance, religious feeling, and extravagant wish-fulfillment, which gives it a voice all its own.

He spent his final years in Venice and died there on October 23, 1913. Although he was never a conventional literary figure, Rolfe has continued to attract devoted readers, in part because the boundary between his life and his art was so thin.