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4 unusual facts about Ronald Firbank


Ronald Firbank

Valmouth (1919) is based on the lives of various people in a health resort on the West Coast of England; most of the inhabitants are centenarians, and some are older ("the last time I went to the play...was with Charles the Second and Louise de Querouaille, to see Betterton play Shylock").

A musical comedy of 1958 by Sandy Wilson gave the novel some popularity in the 1960s, and has been revived several times and recorded on CD.

The poet W. H. Auden praised him highly in a radio broadcast on the BBC Third Programme in June 1961 (the text of the broadcast was published in The Listener of 8 June 1961).

The Curious Room

It also contains a draft of a libretto for an opera based on Orlando: A Biography by Virginia Woolf, and five radio plays: "Vampirella", which she then reworked as "The Lady of the House of Love" in The Bloody Chamber collection, "The Company of Wolves", "Puss in Boots" (both reworkings of Charles Perrault's fairy tales) and two "artificial biographies", one of Victorian painter, Richard Dadd, who murdered his father, and the other about Edwardian novelist, Ronald Firbank.



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