The 100 best novels: No 37 Hadrian the Seventh by Frederick Rolfe

This entertaining if contrived story of a hack writer and priest who becomes pope sheds vivid light on its eccentric author described by DH Lawrence as a 'man-demon'

Frederick Rolfe, who also styled himself "Baron Corvo" (and sometimes gave his full name as Frederick William Serafino Austin Lewis Mary Rolfe), is one of the strangest fish in the exotic aquarium of Edwardian literature. His masterpiece, Hadrian the Seventh, is both a book of its epoch orchidaceous, eccentric and weirdly obsessive, some would say mad as well as being, in DH Lawrence's summary, "the book of a man-demon".

Rolfe (pronounced "roaf") was born in London in 1860, the son of a piano manufacturer. He grew up, a homosexual with paedophile instincts, in the hot-house cultural climate that nurtured many late-Victorian literary men, notably Oscar Wilde and the Aubrey Beardsley of The Yellow Book , as well as Edwardians such as HH Munro ("Saki") and Max Beerbohm.

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