(Arthur Annesley) Ronald Firbank

Novelist, born in London, UK. He studied at Cambridge, where he became a Roman Catholic, but left without taking a degree, and travelled in Europe. His novels (written on piles of blue postcards) are slight but innovative, and anticipate Evelyn Waugh, Anthony Powell, and Ivy Compton-Burnett. His last complete work before his premature death from a disease of the lungs, Concerning the Eccentricities of Cardinal Pirelli (1926), is quintessential Firbank, the dialogue witty and inconsequential, the hero meeting his end while in ardent pursuit of a choir boy.

Arthur Annesley Ronald Firbank was a British novelist.

Son of society lady Harriet Jane Garrett and MP Sir Thomas Firbank, Firbank went to Uppingham School, and then on to Trinity Hall, Cambridge.

Living off his inheritance he travelled around Spain, Italy, the Middle East, and North Africa. From then, from The Artificial Princess (1915) to Concerning the Eccentricities of Cardinal Pirelli (1920) he published a series of novels.

His longest novel is Vainglory (1915).

Inclinations (1916), takes place mainly in Greece, where Mabel Collins, 15, is traveling with her female chaperone, Miss O'Brookomore; Mabel elopes with an Italian conte, but the plot is of minor importance, the book's interest - as with all Firbank's work - lying in the dialogue.

Valmouth (1918), is based on the activities of various people in a health resort on the West Coast of England; was with Charles the Second and Louise de Querouaille, to see Betterton play Shylock.') The plot, such as it is, is concerned with the attempts of two elderly ladies, Mrs Hustpierpoint and Mrs Thoroughfare, to marry off the heir to Hare-Hatch House, Captain Dick Thoroughfare, who is engaged to a Black woman, Niri-Esther, is loved frantically by Thetis Tooke, a farmer's daughter, but prefers his 'chum', Jack Whorwood, to both of them.

In The Flower Beneath The Foot (1923), the setting is an imaginary country which may be assumed to be somewhere in the Balkans.

Sorrow in Sunlight, alternatively entitled Prancing Nigger (1925) was especially successful in America.

Concerning the Eccentricities of Cardinal Pirelli (1926) begins with the Cardinal christening a dog in his cathedral ('And thus being cleansed and purified, I do call thee "Crack"!') and ends with His Eminence dying of a heart attack while nakedly chasing a choirboy around the aisles.

Firbank's one play, The Princess Zoubaroff (1920), has been compared to William Congreve, but is rarely produced; I should like to shake Switzerland.'

Some critics dismissed, and still dismiss his novels as slight, but they have been championed by a large number of English novelists including E.

Ronald Firbank died of lung disease while in Rome. He left among his manuscripts the first few characteristic chapters of a novel set in New York, The New Rythum [sic], published in 1962 after a sale of many of his manuscripts and letters.

His Complete Short Stories were published in a single volume in 1990 (ed. Steven Moore), and his Complete Plays in 1991 in a volume containing The Princess Zoubaroff, The Mauve Tower and A Disciple from the Country.

For biography, see:

Jocelyn Brooke, Ronald Firbank, London, Arthur Barker, 1951 an essay in Osbert Sitwell, Noble Essences, London, MacMillan, 1950 Brigid Brophy, Prancing Novelist (1973)