He taught briefly at The King's School, Grantham, where the then headmaster, Ernest Hardy, later principal of Jesus College, Oxford, became a lifelong friend.

He lived in the era before the welfare state, and relied on benefactors for support but he had an argumentative nature and a tendency to fall out spectacularly with most of the people who tried to help him and offer him room and board.

These and his Toto stories contain pederastic elements, but the young male pupils he was teaching at the time unanimously recalled in later life that there had never been any hint of impropriety in his relations with them.

[7] In 1904, soon after his ordination as a Roman Catholic priest, the convert Robert Hugh Benson formed a chaste but passionate friendship with Rolfe.

[9] Rolfe sought to characterise the relationships in his fiction as examples of 'Greek love' between an older man and an ephebe, and thus endow them with the sanction of the ancient Hellenic tradition familiar to all Edwardians with a classical education.

[12] Set in the fifth century, the novel was to have as its protagonist a middle-aged Byzantine bishop named Septimius, preoccupied with the likelihood of another of the barbarian attacks which had been terrifying his Venetian flock.

These works differ from the autobiographical novels in two respects: they are set in previous centuries, and the principal protagonist in each is not Rolfe's alter ego, although there is a strong degree of identification.

Rolfe also wrote shorter fiction, published in contemporary periodicals and collected after his death in Three Tales of Venice (1950), Amico di Sandro (1951), The Cardinal Prefect of Propaganda (1957) and The Armed Hands (1974).

While he began to experiment with photography when he was a schoolmaster, it was his time in Rome in 1889–90 that introduced him to the work of the 'Arcadian' photographers Wilhelm von Gloeden and Guglielmo Plüschow.

Rolfe continued to indulge his interest in photography in Christchurch in Dorset in 1890–91, upon his return from Rome, and experimented with colour and underwater pictures.

When he worked in his late teens and early twenties as a schoolmaster, and later when he tried his hand at painting and photography, he saw these as stop-gap occupations, means of earning an income until the Church authorities came to their senses and agreed with his own firm view that he had a priestly vocation.

From 1895 to 1899 he lived in Holywell in Flintshire in North Wales, where he painted some fourteen processional banners, commissioned by the parish priest there, Fr Charles Sidney Beauclerk.

Only five of the banners have survived, and may still be seen in the Holywell Well Museum; they are colourful representations, in a naive style, of Saints Winefride, George, Ignatius, Gregory the Great and Augustine of Canterbury.

Rolfe's early books were politely reviewed but none of them was enough of a success to secure an income for its author, whose posthumous reputation began to dim.

A. Symons published The Quest for Corvo, one of the century's iconic biographies, and this brought Rolfe's life and work to the attention of a wider public.

His influence has been discerned in novels written by Henry Harland, Ronald Firbank,[17] Graham Greene,[18] and Alexander Theroux,[19] and in his coinage of neologisms and use of the Ulysses story there is some perhaps coincidental prefiguring of the work of James Joyce.