Hadrian the Seventh - Hardcover

Rolfe, Frederick William

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0701110848 ISBN 13: 9780701110840

Publisher: Vintage/Ebury (A Division of Random House Group), 1975

Synopsis

Contrite priests suddenly bestow Holy Orders on a wretched failure who was expelled from the seminary for lack of a true vocation. He is soon in Rome with his bishop to elect a new Pope. The stymied conclave elects the dedicated new priest: Hadrian VII. The new Pope decides to sell Vatican art treasures to finance feeding the world's poor. He smokes on the throne and entertains old friends like his landlady and new ones like a seminarian who is having a hard go of it until an assassin puts an end to Hadrian VII.

About this title

About the Author:

Frederick Rolfe (1860-1913), also known as Baron Corvo, was born of a respectable Dissenting family in Cheapside. He converted to Catholicism when he was twenty-six and attempted to enter the priesthood. After he was ejected from the seminary, on the grounds of his extremely 'difficult' temperament and eccentricities, he pledged himself to two decades of celibacy and proceeded to write several semi-autobiographical novels. His relations with his publishers and friends, on whose beneficence he relied, were frequently fractious, and he died poor at his preferred restaurant in Venice.

Review:

It is extraordinarily alive, even though it has been buried for twenty years. Up it rises to confront us...Only a first-rate book escapes its date...The book remains a clear and definite book of our epoch, not to be swept aside.
— D.H. Lawrence

Frederick Rolfe alias Baron Corvo is certainly one of the most fascinating of those various literary curiosities of England.
— Saturday Review

About this edition

• Publisher: Vintage/Ebury (A Division of Random House Group)
• Publication date: 1975
• ISBN 10: 0701110848
• ISBN 13: 9780701110840
• Binding: Hardcover