Hadrian VII

Rolfe, Fr, ( Frederick Baron Corvo)

ISBN 10: 0330254030 / ISBN 13: 9780330254038

Published by Picador, London, 1978

About this Item

Some shelf and edge wear, original cover price scratched out on rear cover, Christmas gift message dated 1978 to front endpaper, paper edge toned with light foxing. ; First printing of Picador paperback edition, 1978. Nice tight copy. Cover artwork by Gerald Humberstone Garley. ; 320 pages; A set of curious circumstances, brought about by Vatican politics, propels George Arthur Rose from despised obscurity in a London slum to the throne of St Peter. In a matter of weeks, the entire world is turned upside-down as the new Pope embarks upon a programme of ecclesiastical and geopolitical reform.

Seller Inventory # 33915

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Hadrian VII
• Publisher: Picador, London
• Publication Date: 1978
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0330254030
• ISBN 13: 9780330254038
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition: Reprint; First Printing.
• Condition: Very Good

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.