Ronald Firbank's grandfather was the classic Victorian self-made man, who started out as a Durham mineworker at the age of seven, educated himself and became one of the leading railway contractors of his time. Just to prove that there's nothing in heredity, Ronald (called Artie before he became a writer) turned out to be allergic to all forms of organised schooling, never passed an exam in his life, and was so unsuccessful as a writer in his own short lifetime that he had to use his (quite modest) inherited wealth to subsidise the publication of all of his books.

He's scarcely better known nowadays: if you come from a certain kind of background (mostly centred around middle-aged Oxbridge/Ivy League queens of high-anglican leanings, I suspect) you'll have heard of him as a cult early-20th-century author of camp novels with a hint of LGBT naughtiness, but the chance of your actually having read him is pretty minimal. And that's despite the way a whole succession of influential writers have gone out of their way to promote him, including in his own time Evelyn Waugh(*), the Sitwells, Lord Berners, and Carl Von Vechten; later on others including Anthony Powell, John Betjeman, Brigid Brophy and Alan Hollinghurst stood up to be counted.

Brophy's critical study of Firbank is almost as long as his collected works, coming in at some 600 pages in paperback, but it turns out to be a very lively read, because she has strong opinions about the merits of his writing and the way it's been treated by people who don't have the perception to appreciate it properly (including his previous biographers). She makes a very strong case for Firbank as someone who made an important contribution to modernist ideas about fiction and how it should work: at times she seems to see him as the Stravinsky of Eng Lit, but she doesn't seem to be able to tie him into direct influences on later writers. Or indeed contemporaries. We don't get much more than hints that Virginia Woolf read Firbank, for instance.

Naturally, Brophy has some sillinesses of her own too: she's writing in 1973, so there is far more Freud than we really need (to give her credit, she has clearly read Freud attentively and criticises him from time to time: she isn't just quoting off the peg theories). And she has a bee in her bonnet about Firbank's Irishness, through his Anglo-Irish mother, something there's scarcely any trace of in his writings.

Where she is undoubtedly on the mark is in her close attention to the huge influence Oscar Wilde had on Firbank, and the way he used his early writings to work this out of his system, culminating in the Salome-pastiche in The accidental princess.

In the final chapters of the book, we are led one by one through all of Firbank's books in quite some detail: this turns out to be very helpful, both in revealing patterns that we might otherwise have missed and in giving hints at decoding some of the more deeply encoded references in the text. She also discusses Firbank's many oddities of spelling, grammar, punctuation, translation, etc., some of which are clearly simple mistakes, but many turn out to be stretching language in unexpected ways. He seems to have had a kind of horror of being quite precise in any language other than French, including English. His Italian and Spanish are both horrible (intentionally or not), and his English often picks up odd French tinges of word-order and vocabulary. For instance, he uses "berce" as a verb several times, a word that doesn't appear in the OED, but whose meaning "to cradle" would be obvious to anyone who understands French (and could be guessed from the context anyway).

What Brophy doesn't bother to explain are Firbank's occasional buried dirty jokes: those are left to surprise the reader (including some I only picked up on a second or third reading...).
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(*)The young Waugh gave Firbank rave reviews — later on he cooled off rather. Brophy suggests this is because he didn't want readers to see how much he'd stolen from Firbank's techniques in his early books. More prosaically it's probably got a lot to do with the older Waugh's lack of sense of humour where Catholicism was concerned. ( )