Robert Hugh Benson and Frederick Rolfe

 

Robert Hugh Benson at Eton

 

 

Over at the ever-wonderful Strange Flowers, Jame Conway describes the relationship between Frederick Rolfe and Robert Hugh Benson, and between their books as follows:

"Frederick Rolfe casts himself in his own roman à clef (The Desire and Pursuit of the Whole), casts another such book (The Sentimentalists) in which he himself is fictionally presented inside this book (as The Sensiblist) and has his avatar write his own work (Peter of England) which is itself a fictional stand-in for another roman à clef (Hadrian the Seventh) in which Rolfe, then in the semi-fictional persona of Baron Corvo, casts himself as George Arthur Rose, who through a vividly improbable set of circumstances becomes Pope under the name Hadrian VII."

Brilliant...