Firbank, (Arthur Annesley) Ronald (1886–1926)

English novelist. His work, set in the Edwardian decadent period, has a malicious humour and witty sophistication. It includes Caprice (1917), Valmouth (1919), and the bizarre fantasy Concerning the Eccentricities of Cardinal Pirelli (1926).

Firbank was born in London, the son of a wealthy MP, and was educated mostly at home. He travelled through France and Spain, and published a small volume of short stories before going to Trinity Hall, Cambridge, 1906. He was already noted for his foppishness and extravagance, and left 1909 without a degree. In London, as a literary man-about-town, he struck many as ridiculous, and others as greatly talented, but produced little. During World War I he moved to Oxford and there wrote four books, among them Vainglory 1915 and Valmouth; these, together with a play and another novel, The Flower Beneath the Foot 1923, received little notice. His first widely appreciated work was Sorrow in Sunlight 1925 (published as Prancing Nigger in the USA).