22 Facts About Frederick Rolfe

Frederick William Rolfe, better known as Baron Corvo, and calling himself Frederick William Serafino Austin Lewis Mary Rolfe, was an English writer, artist, photographer and eccentric.

Frederick Rolfe left school at the age of fourteen and became a teacher.

Frederick Rolfe taught briefly at The King's School, Grantham, where the then headmaster, Ernest Hardy, later principal of Jesus College, Oxford, became a lifelong friend.

Frederick Rolfe converted to Roman Catholicism in 1886 and was confirmed by Cardinal Manning.

Frederick Rolfe spent most of his life as a freelance writer, mainly in England but eventually in Venice.

Frederick Rolfe lived in the era before the welfare state, and relied on benefactors for support but he had an argumentative nature and a tendency to fall out spectacularly with most of the people who tried to help him and offer him room and board.

Frederick Rolfe was buried in the San Michele cemetery on the Isola di San Michele in Venice.

Frederick Rolfe was entirely comfortable with his homosexuality and associated and corresponded with a number of other homosexual Englishmen.

Frederick Rolfe returned the favour a few years later, putting a caricature of Benson named "Bobugo Bonsen" in a book named Nicholas Crabbe.

Frederick Rolfe sought to characterise the relationships in his fiction as examples of 'Greek love' between an older man and an ephebe, and thus endow them with the sanction of the ancient Hellenic tradition familiar to all Edwardians with a classical education.

In 1912, the year before his death, Frederick Rolfe began to write another autobiographical novel, The Freeing of the Soul, or The Seven Degrees, of which only a few pages have survived.

Frederick Rolfe wrote four other novels: Don Tarquinio, Don Renato, The Weird of the Wanderer, and Hubert's Arthur.

Frederick Rolfe wrote shorter fiction, published in contemporary periodicals and collected after his death in Three Tales of Venice, Amico di Sandro, The Cardinal Prefect of Propaganda and The Armed Hands.

Frederick Rolfe seized upon every opportunity for writing a letter, and every letter, whether to a publisher or to a cobbler, was written with the same care.

Frederick Rolfe took an interest in photography throughout his life, but never achieved any more than basic competence.

Frederick Rolfe's models were the local ragazzi from the streets of Genzano di Roma, a town dominated by the Duchess's palazzo.

Frederick Rolfe began to lose interest and really only took photography up again when he returned to Italy in 1908.

Frederick Rolfe never lost his conviction that he had been called to the Catholic priesthood.

Frederick Rolfe executed some of the most impressive of them when he was living in Christchurch in 1890 and 1891, including a small but striking oil painting of St Michael.

Frederick Rolfe painted the figures of the saints and John Holden assisted with the lettering on the borders.

Frederick Rolfe produced no further paintings after he became a full-time writer.

Frederick Rolfe's influence has been discerned in novels written by Henry Harland, Ronald Firbank, Graham Greene, and Alexander Theroux, and in his coinage of neologisms and use of the Ulysses story there is some perhaps coincidental prefiguring of the work of James Joyce.