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Ronald Firbank

British author
Alternative Title: Arthur Annesley Ronald Firbank
Ronald Firbank
British author
Also known as
  • Arthur Annesley Ronald Firbank

January 17, 1886

London, England


May 21, 1926

Rome, Italy

Ronald Firbank, in full Arthur Annesley Ronald Firbank (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).

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Novelists like Ronald Firbank and Evelyn Waugh (who studied painting and was a competent draftsman) learned, in a more general sense, how to follow the examples of the Impressionist and Postimpressionist painters in their fiction. A spare brilliance of observation, like those paintings in which a whole scene is suggested through carefully selected points of colour, replaced that careful...
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