author
Frederick Rolfe
1860–1913
Best known by the self-invented title Baron Corvo, this singular English writer turned frustration, ambition, and wit into some of the strangest fiction of his time. His most famous novel, Hadrian the Seventh, imagines the rejected outsider suddenly raised to the papacy.
3 Audiobooks
Hadrian the Seventh
by Frederick Rolfe
The weird of the wanderer : Being the papyrus records of some incidents in one of the previous lives of Mr. Nicholas Crabbe
by Frederick Rolfe, C. H. C. (Charles Harry Clinton) Pirie-Gordon
Chronicles of the house of Borgia
by Frederick Rolfe
About the author
Born in London in 1860, Frederick Rolfe was an English writer, artist, and photographer who became far better known under the name Baron Corvo. After converting to Roman Catholicism, he repeatedly tried to enter the priesthood, but those hopes fell apart, and that sense of exclusion shaped both his life and his work.
Rolfe wrote fiction, stories, poems, and historical pieces, but Hadrian the Seventh (1904) remains the book most closely linked with him. In it, a man rejected by the Church is unexpectedly made pope, and the novel is often read as a brilliant, bitter, and darkly funny fantasy of revenge and self-creation. His prose and personality both earned him a reputation for brilliance, quarrelsomeness, and eccentricity.
He spent part of his later life in Venice, where he died in 1913. Long after his death, readers kept returning to him not only for the unusual beauty and sharpness of his writing, but also for the unforgettable legend he built around himself.