Between Audacity and Convention: a Reassessment of Frederick Rolfe’s Fiction

This paper offers a new look at Frederick Rolfe's works of fiction. Owing to his eccentricities and quarrelsome character - which are undisputed facts - the perceived quality of his writings was sometimes depreciated. However, Rolfe was a much better writer than he was given credit for. The problem was that his idiosyncratic approach to fiction was particularly ill-suited for the landscape of Edwardian literature. Rolfe was inspired by historical fiction, which was seen as a genre primarily for adolescents at the time; his experiments with language were frowned upon; his plots were either seen as flimsy or over-the-top. Yet future generations of artists, including such modernists as James Joyce and D. H, Lawrence, looked at them with a kinder eye, appreciating Rolfe's experiments with language and form, seeing him as a more profound artists than the (admittedly enjoyable) work of his peers, such as Henry Harland or Max Beerbohm. This paper attempts to find the tendencies in literature that influenced Rolfe as a literary figure, and how changes in these tendencies influenced the assessment of his works.