The Quest for Corvo

First published in 1934, this biography of Frederick Rolfe, who styled himself Baron Corvo, is also an account of how the biographer hunted his subject. Symons tracks Rolfe from a failed Catholic priesthood through Grub Street, Venice, and a trail of angry letters, unfinished schemes, and the novel Hadrian the Seventh, in which a rejected Englishman becomes pope. Friends, enemies, and surviving papers contradict one another. The book is a detective-style life of a paranoid minor writer, not a conventional official biography.

Quarter-bound in black buckram with light grey boards blocked with a design in dark grey and red. White dust-jacket printed in red.