Frederick Rolfe - Posthumous Literary Reputation

Posthumous Literary Reputation

Rolfe's early books were politely reviewed but none of them was enough of a success to secure an income for its author, whose posthumous reputation began to dim. Within a very few years, however, small coteries of readers began to discover a common interest in his work, and a resilient literary cult began to form. In 1934 A J A Symons published The Quest for Corvo, one of the century’s iconic biographies, and this brought Rolfe’s life and work to the attention of a wider public. In the 1950s and 1960s, there was a further surge of interest in him which became known as ‘the Corvo revival,’ including a successful adaptation of Hadrian for the London stage. Two biographies of Rolfe appeared in the 1970s. These led to his inclusion in all the major works of reference and engendered a stream of academic theses on him. Although his books have remained in print, no substantial monograph has ever appeared in English on his work. With the growing academic interest in the history of literary modernism and acknowledgement of the central importance of life writing in its genesis, the true importance of Rolfe’s autobiographical fictions has come into focus. His influence has been discerned in novels written by Henry Harland, Ronald Firbank and Graham Greene, and in his coinage of neologisms and use of the Ulysses story there is some perhaps coincidental prefiguring of the works of James Joyce.