Hadrian the Seventh

Rolfe, Fr. (Frederick Baron Corvo)

ISBN 10: 0140020314 / ISBN 13: 9780140020311

Published by Penguin Books, 1982

About this Item

Fictionalised account of an English Pope. Weight: 1.0 Language: English.

Seller Inventory # 41053

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Hadrian the Seventh
• Publisher: Penguin Books
• Publication Date: 1982
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0140020314
• ISBN 13: 9780140020311
• Binding: Paper covers
• Edition: Reprint of paperback edition.
• Condition: Fine
• Dust Jacket Condition: No Jacket
• Seller catalogs:
  • Biographies

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.