Frederick Rolfe, who also styled himself "Baron Corvo" (and sometimes gave his full name as Frederick William Serafino Austin Lewis Mary Rolfe), is one of the strangest fish in the exotic aquarium of Edwardian literature. His masterpiece, Hadrian the Seventh, is both a book of its epoch orchidaceous, eccentric and weirdly obsessive, some would say mad as well as being, in DH Lawrence's summary, "the book of a man-demon". Rolfe (pronounced "roaf") was born in London in 1860, the son of a piano manufacturer. He grew up, a homosexual with paedophile instincts, in the hot-house cultural climate that nurtured many late-Victorian literary men, notably Oscar Wilde and the Aubrey Beardsley of The Yellow Book, as well as Edwardians such as HH Mohra ("Saki") and Max behorn. For 10 years, Rolfe was a provincial schoolmaster and would-be Roman Catholic priest. His conversion to Rome in 1886 proved abortive and frustrating. His awkward personality and angry tongue blighted his adult life and led to his dismissal from the priesthood not once but twice. Thereafter, he drifted into a hand-to-mouth career as journalist, painter and photographer. At the age of 40 he began to write seriously, living in near-penury for years while sustaining an eccentric lifestyle, wearing silver spectacles and glycerine gloves (in bed), while writing with a "magic" glass egg on his desk, and chain-smoking like a devil. Quarrelling with almost everyone, Rolfe ended up, in extremis, living on an open gondola in Venice, as he put it, "homeless and often starving... only keeping alive from fear of crabs and rats". Hadrian the Seventh, Rolfe's first novel (sometimes attributed to the pseudonym Baron Corvo), is a "romance" that reflects its author's life and work. It tells the story of George Arthur Rose, a hack writer and minor priest, who, through bizarre but semi-plausible ecclesiastical vicissitudes, becomes elected Pope. "The previous English pontiff," he declares, "was Hadrian the Fourth. The present English pontiff is Hadrian the Seventh. It pleases us; and so, by Our own impulse, We command." we have a small favour to ask. More people are reading the Guardian than ever but advertising revenues across the media are falling fast. And unlike many news organisations, we haven’t put up a paywall we want to keep our journalism as open as we can. So you can see why we need to ask for your help. The Guardian’s independent, investigative journalism takes a lot of time, money and hard work to produce. But we do it because we believe our perspective matters because it might well be your perspective, too.