Nicholas Crabbe:

by Frederick Rolfe

Nicholas Crabbe, also called by its author The One and the Many, is at once an hilarious satire of literary life at the turn of the century — or at any time, for readers will delight in recognizing contemporary types and present-day literary rackets — and an account of Rolfe's own heart-breaking literary struggles in London. It is told with that odd, captivating mixture of wish-fulfilment and unwincing self-analysis that is the characteristic of all his work. Bizarre, tragic, humorous and subtle by turn, it is one of the most entertaining and amazing books this strange man ever wrote.

The story of Nicholas Crabbe, a gentleman of cultivation, who saves and then is loved and cared for by a boyish girl in her teens, this novel is as transparently auto-biograpical as Hadrian the Seventh and Nicholas Crabbe. It is shot through with brilliant description and phrases, with magnificent delusion and genuine grandeur. For years Corvo had been sharpening his verbal claws, and here there is a monstrous display of invective, as pleasing in the printed page as it might be frightening in life.

The love for Zilda, the boyish girl, may be disguised homosexuality, but a second love of the hero/author, for the city of Venice, is shown without guile, Here are descriptions of Venetian life of a vividness almost unequalled in all the literature about that city.

Genres: Fiction

256 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1958

About the author

English writer, novelist, artist, fantasist and eccentric. Rolfe is also known as Baron Corvo. His best known work is the novel Hadrian the Seventh.