Frederick Rolfe

Frederick William Rolfe, better known as Baron Corvo, and also calling himself 'Frederick William Serafino Austin Lewis Mary Rolfe', (July 22, 1860 - October 25, 1913), was an English writer, artist, photographer and eccentric. His heavily autobiographical fictions are milestones in the history of life-writing, and literary historians have begun to acknowledge these works as among the precursors of modernism. 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 taught briefly at Grantham School, where the then headmaster, Ernest Hardy, later Principal of Jesus College, Oxford, became a lifelong friend. He converted to Roman Catholicism in 1886 and was...