Ronald Firbank has been called the last of the 1890s decadents, the first impressionist novelist, and a modernist like James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and D.H. Lawrence. Basically, however, he is an eccentric writer who belongs to no school. Though influenced by Maurice Maeterlinck, Joris Huysmans, Théophile Gautier, and Oscar Wilde, he remains independent of them. His uniqueness has attracted the admiration of many critics and novelists, from Arthur Waley to Edmund Wilson, from Evelyn Waugh to E. M. Forster to Osbert Sitwell. But despite their praise the number of his readers has remained small, and most of his books were published at his own expense.

It was an expense he could afford. His background, as Anthony Powell has pointed out in his introduction to The Complete Ronald Firbank (1961), is a very English story: his great-grandfather was an illiterate coal miner, his grandfather one of the...