Hadrian the Seventh

Baron Corvo,Frederick Rolfe

ISBN 10: 048622323X / ISBN 13: 9780486223230

Published by Dover Publications January 1977, 1977

About this Item

Foxing and thumbing to edges, minor foxing to pages, name inside cover.

Seller Inventory # 1034086

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Hadrian the Seventh
• Publisher: Dover Publications January 1977
• Publication Date: 1977
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 048622323X
• ISBN 13: 9780486223230
• Binding: Trade Paperback
• Condition: Good
• Seller catalogs:
  • 27-FICTION

About this title

Synopsis

One day George Arthur Rose, hack writer and minor priest, discovers that he has been picked to be Pope. He is hardly surprised and not in the least daunted. "The previous English pontiff was Hadrian the Fourth," he declares. "The present English pontiff is Hadrian the Seventh. It pleases Us; and so, by Our own impulse, We command."Hadrian is conceived in the image of his creator, Fr. Rolfe, whose aristocratic pretensions (he called himself Baron Corvo), religious obsession, and anarchic and self-aggrandizing sensibility have made him known as one of the great English eccentrics. Fr. Rolfe endured a lifetime of indignities and disappointments. However, in the hilarious and touching pages of this, his finest novel, he triumphs.

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.