Firbank, Ronald

▪ British author

born January 17, 1886, London, England

died May 21, 1926, Rome, Italy

      English novelist who was a literary innovator of some importance. Greatly indebted to the literature of the 1890s, his is a peculiarly fantastic and perverse, idiosyncratic humour. His wit largely depends upon the shape and cadence of the sentence and upon an eccentric and personal vocabulary. He influenced later novelists Evelyn Waugh and Ivy Compton-Burnett.

      A delicate child, Firbank was educated mainly privately, but he spent some two years at the University of Cambridge. Thereafter, he largely traveled for the sake of his health. He was painfully shy and had a habit of writhing his body and grasping his head. Firbank's eccentricities, drinking, and witty remarks soon made him a well-known, even legendary, figure in London intellectual and bohemian life.

      Firbank's most notable novels are Vainglory (1915), Inclinations (1916), Caprice (1917), Valmouth (1919), The Flower Beneath the Foot (1923), Sorrow in Sunlight (1924), and Concerning the Eccentricities of Cardinal Pirelli (1926).

Additional Reading

James D. Merritt, Ronald Firbank (1969), offers a concise survey of his life and work. Miriam J. Benkovitz, Ronald Firbank (1969), is a good biography based on primary sources. Shorter studies are collected in Mervyn Horder (ed.), Ronald Firbank: Memoirs and Critiques (1977).

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