How long does it take to read The Quest for Corvo?
A. J. A. Symons, Baron (Subject) Corvo
The Quest for Corvo by A. J. A. Symons, Baron (Subject) Corvo takes about 5 hours 22 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.
About 5 hours 22 minutes
A weekend read
First published 1934. 293 pages, about 80,575 words.
11 days at 30 minutes a day
Estimate based on 275 words per page.
At other speeds
| Slow, 150 words a minute | 8 hours 57 minutes |
| Average, 250 words a minute | 5 hours 22 minutes |
| Fast, 400 words a minute | 3 hours 21 minutes |
The page count is the median across 48 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.
About the book
A.J.A. Symons’s life is changed forever when his friend Millard, a dealer in rare books, lends him an old tome and a stack of manuscript letters. The book is Hadrian the Seventh (1904), the work of one “Fr. Rolfe”; it is a brilliant and bizarre fantasy, in which a downtrodden English writer is one day unexpectedly elected Pope. The letters tell of the final days of Rolfe (alias Baron Corvo) in Venice – penniless, homeless, and starving – and set out in lurid detail the depths of his sexual depravity. Compelled to learn more about Rolfe and understand how a man who could write a masterpiece like Hadrian the Seventh could wind up dying in squalor in Italy, Symons sets out on his ‘Quest for Corvo’, tracing Rolfe’s family, friends, and enemies, and piecing together from their accounts the life of this enigmatic genius. What emerges is a thrilling page-turner, as compelling and mysterious as a detective novel, and as we follow Symons’s quest and discover the often funny, often heartbreaking facts of the life of the eccentric Baron, we make the acquaintance of not one, but two fascinating men: Rolfe and his biographer. Subtitled ‘an experiment in biography’, Symons’s book remains one of the greatest biographies ever written and an enduring work of twentieth-century English literature. This first-ever digital edition makes Symons’s finest work available to a new generation of readers and joins several of Corvo’s works, also available from Valancourt Books.
Subjects: Gay authors, British, English Authors, Biography as a literary form, Eccentrics and eccentricities, Authors, English
